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THE 


WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


TO 


CHRISTIAN FAITH 


bY 


JAS. MULCHAHEY, S.T.D 


ST, PAUL’S CHAPEL, TRINITY PARISH, NEW YORK 


NEW YORK 
JAMES POTT  :& Co., PUBLISHERS 
14 AND 16 AsTOR PLACE 


1885 


CopyRIGHT, 1885, 


By JAMES POTT & CO. 


Press of J. J. Little & Co., 
Nos. 10 to 20 Astor Place, New York, 


Praia Dar Caley, 


THERE is an unquestionable lack of definite 
Christian teaching in modern religious literature. 
And even that of the pulpit seems, for the most 
part, to be constructed on the theory that we 
are in an age when people cannot be expected 
to endure sound doctrine. The present writer 
does not assent to this theory. He believes that 
what the people of this age most urgently need, 
and what they are really craving for, is sound 
doctrine. The dogmatic age, we are told, is gone 
by. Well, if by a dogmatic age is meant the time 
for propounding for popular acceptance the dogmas 
of a mere scholastic theology, its passing away 
has been a good riddance for the Church and the 
world. If it mean the time for propounding for 
such acceptance the dogmas of a sheer Protestant 
theology, it is, in the author’s judgment, a still more 
happy deliverance. The one had no possible bear- 
ing on real life, and the other, while feeding religious 
enthusiasm, begot and fostered a religion of unreal- 
ity, insincerity and selfishness. What wonder, then, 
if, in the reaction from such teaching, there is an 
immense prevalence of religious unbelief? What 


iv - PREFACE. 


wonder if this unbelief is found among those who 
are most sincere and true of heart? But, the remedy 
is, surely, not to be found in the avoidance of all 
religious teaching. The unbelieving of our time are 
not, for the most part, the willingly infidel. The 
unbelief has come from an involuntary, but neces- 
sary rejection of that which was felt to be either 
worthless, or else false and dishonoring to both God 
andman. And the urgent question is, where and 
how to find that which is true in religion, and which, 
as such, is stamped with the credentials of Divine 
Revelation and adapted to fill the heart and guide the 
life of humanity. It was just this question which 
was answered, and just this want which was met in 
the Christian Revelation. And this isthe reason why 
the truth, which in that Revelation was proposed to 
human faith, converted the world. Many are fond 
of saying in our time, that it was a revelation, not of 
abstract truth, but of a Person. But it should be 
remembered that this Person declared distinctly that 
“to this end.” had He “been: born’; sand domeces 
cause’ came He into the world, that He “should 
bear witness unto the truth.” And who will sup- 
pose that any attractive qualities of His Personality, 
His winning amiability, His sympathy and loving 
consideration-for the suffering masses, or the supreme 
excellence of His character, would have so im- 
pressed the world and changed the entire course of 
human civilization, if His life had not been the very 
concrete embodiment and manifestation of divine 
truth? Yes, it is truth, and truth only, which gives 
satisfaction to human hearts, and is the guide of 


PREFACE. V 


human lives. Christian truth, and that alone, is the 
salvation of the world. This is as true now, and 
will be to the end of time, as it was in the beginning 
of the Christian Dispensation. 

It is a leading aim of these sermons to show how 
“the truth as it is in Jesus,” coming into the world 
as a Divine Revelation, did, in its reception gladden 
the hearts and guide the lives of men, and how it is 
ever calculated to work these cheering and saving 
effects. In so far as this aim is reached, it is hoped 
that the book may prove to be helpful to some who 
may have been constrained to halt in their faith, but 
cannot rest zn doubt and unbelief. 


ST. PAUL’S CHAPEL CLERGY Rooms, 
Laster-tide, 1885. 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
In 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/witnessofchurcht0Omulc 


GOING Ne Ss: 


Hi: 
Advent. 
PAGE 
Or FAITH IN THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST AS A His- 
PORICAT © PACT wie teicle *akdu keh he 6 eRe See EE a Seeded I 
II. 
Second Sundap in Advent. 
Tin PURPOSE“ AND SCOPE OF PROPHECY... ..0ccecccns eee LO 
III. 
Third Sundan in Advent. 
THE MINISTERIAL COMMISSION DIVINE IN ORIGIN AND PER- 
PELUATIOND EE Ah «Sih tic ee eee rece UN ei ae Pola 21 
IV. 
Fourth Sunday in Advent. 
THE REVELATION OF THE JUDGMENT DAY..........0se0ees 32 
V. 
Advent. 


re LIVING sFORATHE “JUDGMENT suchas tices tacit h eae feseeens 8 46 


Vili CONTENTS. 


VI. 


Christmas. 


PAGE 
THE HISTORICAL VERITY OF THE INCARNATION....... oes od 


VII. 


Christmas. 


THE VITAL ‘VERITY OF THE INCARNATION, « «000.0 s0iscsuieos 64 


VIII. 
Epiphany. 
THE LIGHT OF THE SWORLD. 7 20. Re bs eee 
IX. 
Epiphany. 
THE PERSONAL MANIFESTATION OF CHRIST.......00- a ae 82 


X. 
Ash Wednesdap. 


THE USE AND BENEFIT OF FASTING... 0.000. s0cccssasies eae) (OL 


dG E 


Lent. 


ANGELIC SuccoR, THROUGH PRAYER AND FASTING......... 103 


XII. 
Passion Week. 


THE HUMILIATION OF ‘THE ETERNAL SON... cues cde IIt 


CONTENTS. ix 
ALIT. 
®ood Frisan. 
PAGE 
PE ATIBACTIVEVLOWER. OF (‘THE CROSS. os os cist sle eG egnte wane 120 
XIV. 
Easter. 
RSPELORIN TCA TIL oo oe cc ok uate er nls onic te SitteC ae oe e a ee ee. 131 
XV. 
Caster. 
BUASTEROICALTH wy clas ic. tccece Satstens alan tuba cle ride cute sie oat ote cere 142 
BON 
Gaster-tide. 
PH RECARNAL MLEMPERWLAITHLESS: Sr at. Oilo bts Cae tenets I5I 
XVII. 
Ascension Map. 
PU EMASCENDEDILLOR Dice t 6 a tec aoe it ioe eee eee Pee 162 
x VIELE 
Ascension-tide. 


CHRIST IN HEAVEN THE HEAD oF His CHURCH ON EARTH. 174 


XIX. 
Whitsundan. 


THE PENTECOSTAL INAUGURATION OF THE DISPENSATION OF 


UES OPIRET Pate oie fatale teal Wits eee hots ace 


x CONTENTS. 


XX. 
Trinitn Sundan. 
PAGE 
THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IN GOD, A WORSHIPPING FAITH..... 195 


3,4 


Crinity Sunday. 


EUNDAMENTAL . PRINCIPLES OF FAITH §. 2)... ¢sucles > see eieee 202 


THE WITNESS OF. THE "CHURCH 
OSC LURT SLANG ery Ell: 


1 


DA ATTH IN RHE ASELECOND COMING OF 
CHRIST AS A HISTORICAL FACT, 


Advent. 


And his disciples asked him saying, Why say the scribes that 
Elias must first come? And Jesus answered and said unto them, 
Elias truly shall come first and restore all things. But I say unto 
you, that Elias is come already, and they have done unto him what- 
soever they listed.— St. Matt. xvit. 10, II, 12. 


Four hundred years before the time when Christ 
was on earth, the last of the old Jewish prophets 
had uttered, and left on the records of inspiration, 
this prediction : “ Behold I will send unto you Elijah 
the prophet before the coming of the great and 
terrible day of the Lord; and he shall turn the heart 
of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the 
children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the 
earth with a curse.” This prediction had, for that 
long period, held its place among the prophetic an- 
nouncements which were interpreted by the Scribes 
and so commonly accepted among the Jewish people 
as unquestionably referring to a coming Messiah. 


But their interpretation of this prophecy corre- 
I 


THE WITNESS “OF THE CHORCH 


i) 


sponded, of course, with the manner in which they 
construed all the other prophecies relating to that 
anticipated visitation ; and the real fulfilment of it, as 
well as of them, was something that they were entirely 
unprepared for. As their conception of the promised 
Messiah was only that of a Prince of the house of 
David, who would give to their national dominion 
more than the glory of David’s reign, so, in his 
promised forerunner they could look for only the 
reappearance of old Elijah, and that, for no other 
purpose but to settle the questions in dispute among 
their several schools, and so prepare the way for an 
undivided allegiance to the Messiah’s government. 
How utterly confounding to all the theories of 
this ambitious scheme was the actual incoming of 
the Redeemer’s dispensation! How entirely differ- 
ent from any conception in it was the true Messiah, 
in person, in condition, in character, in His very 
nature as well as in the purpose and effect of His ad- 
vent! And scarcely less the difference between their 
anticipations, and the real person and work of His 
forerunner. In looking for Elijah again they had 
fastened their thoughts only on a name and aperson, 
but had lost all appreciation of “the Spirit and 
power ” of which that particular person was a typical 
representative. The real Elijah of the prophetic 
announcement was not the name or the individual, 
but it was the coming forth of one in that genera- 
tion, inspired by the same spirit of righteousness and 
holy zeal as that which had fired the heart of the old 
prophet, and summoning the people with authorita- 
tive power not less than his to the decisive issue 


LO-CHRISTIAN FAITA, 5 


between immediate repentance or impending de- 
struction. All this was fulfilled, as the Christ Him- 
self declared, when the voice of John Baptist was 
heard in the wilderness of Judea proclaiming: 
reepent.ye, tor, the Kingdoms of vHeaven. is at 
hand.” 

Now, my brethren, there is for us much pertinent 
matter for very serious reflection in this illustration 
of the mistaken interpretation which the Jews had 
put upon the prophecies given to prepare them for 
the dispensation of the Redeemer. If the present 
season, which the Church has named the Advent 
Season, have any purpose for us, it is that of fixing 
our eyes and thoughts on the prophetic announce- 
ment of a future coming of the same Redeemer and 
the consequent closing up of the present dispensa- 
tion, for the bringing in of another wherein the 
glory of His righteousness shall shine forth, with- 
out cloud or shadow of obscurity, forever and 
ever. 

Now it is just as true of us as it was of the old 
Jews, that our estimation of these prophecies,—the 
use we make of them and the interpretation we put 
upon them,—will give a very fair test and gauge of 
the tone and temper of our religious faith. 

t is a possibility which we have to look at in all 
seriousness, and with more than seriousness,—even 
with foreboding alarm,—if it be found true, that 
the Advent call may find us utterly devoid of faith. 
When the voice of John Baptist was heard in the 
wilderness of Judea declaring that the kingdom of 
Heaven was at hand, the proclamation was met by 


4 LLL CUE LIEN SSMOL Od fe 6 OL ORCA 


an appreciative response from the expectation of a 
new dispensation, which was then unquestionably 
general inthe hearts of the people. Faith in the 
prophecies, to that extent at least, was generally 
held. But in this nineteenth century of the Chris- 
tian dispensation, the very first practical applica- 
tion which we have to make of the Advent call is 
to put to ourselves directly the question, whether 
we do in truth care anything about it or have any 
degree of real faith in it? 

{t is altogether too clear for question, that in our 
merely nominal Christendom, the Advent announce- 
ment, if it could even be heard, as it is not, by the 
great majority of the people, would fall on their ears 
with as little impression of truth or meaning as that 
of the wind which passeth by and is utterly un- 
heeded. The life that now is may not be satisfac- 
tory to them,—indeed it is not; but it is all they 
live for, and the good which may possibly be found 
in it all that they have any expectation of enjoying 
or realizing. 

But by us who claim to be more than nominal 
Christians the question must be met, whether in our 
own hearts there is in truth any expectation or de- 
sire which is responsive to the Advent proclamation, 
and whether we have any real faith in it ? 

If we listen to the organs of modern religious 
thought and opinion, we shall be told that the ex- 
pectation of a second coming of Christ is a fanatical 
expectation: that, in the type of Christian faith which 
is held in the intelligent minds of the present gen- 
eration, there is no place for such an expectation, or 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 5 


even for the admission of such an event as within 
the conditions of reasonable probability. 

Can this be true? What, then, can we mean in 
declaring every time that we repeat the Apostles’ 
Creed: “I believe” ... that “He ascended into 
Heaven, and ... from thence He shall come to 
judge the quick and the dead”; or more explicitly still 
in the Nicene form: “ He shall come again with glory 
to judge both the quick and the dead; whose King- 
dom shall have no end.” Can it be possible that we 
have been repeating this as a plain declaration of our 
faith all our lives, and yet have no real belief in the 
probability of the fact which is so plainly asserted ? 

In that case, our unbelief is not only deplorably 
inconsistent, but it is branded with the stamp of its 
own self-refutation. For it is an unmistakable mark 
of a generation of unbelievers, such as our Lord Him- 
self plainly indicated in His prophetic question re- 
ferring to the last age of the world: “ When the Son 
of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?” 

It is to be hoped, however, that many who so 
speak or think have, in their hearts, more faith than 
appears in their notions, since it is not unlikely that 
they have confounded the credibility of the fact 
of the Lord’s second advent with a very reasonable 
question as to that of certain fanatical theories con- 
cerning the time and the manner, the historical signs 
and circumstances, of that great epoch. Asa fact 
simply, the second coming of the Son of God for 
judgment in the world is as clearly asserted in 
Christian prophecy as is His first coming in Christian 
history. Very plain and frequently repeated pre- 


6 LHL WLINEL SSOP. THEE CHOON Cre 


dictions of this final issue of the Christian dispensa- 
tion were so marked a feature of our Lord’s personal 
teachings as to be an unmistakable characteristic of 
the Christian revelation, coloring its whole repre- 
sentation of our relations in the presént world and 
of all the interests and duties of life in it. So it is 
not surprising that, from the very beginning, specu- 
lation was keenly stimulated, and theories as to the 
time and manner of the second coming of Christ 
were formed; nor that, in every seeming crisis in the 
history of the church and the world, there has been 
a newly quickened interest in such speculations and 
theories. In our time sectarian fanaticism has run 
specially in this direction, and we have had occasion 
more than once, within personal recollection, to note 
the failure of fanatical calculations and consequent 
preparations for the personal advent of Christ and 
the end of the world. 

But, in our disgust at such fanaticism, let us take 
care that we ourselves lose not the faith. They are 
wrong, unquestionably, in their ignorant miscalcula- 
tions and their crude expectations concerning the 
time and manner of the Advent; but they are not 
wrong in their fundamental faith. They are essen- 
tially right also in their feelings; right in their dili- 
gent study and warm appreciation of the prophetic 
promises ; right in their earnest desire and longing 
for the Lord’s coming; right in the watchful antici- 
pation of His coming as possible at any moment, and 
in holding themselves to the obligation of being 
found ready whenever that possibility shall become 
fact. Nor is an assured conviction of faith in this 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 7 


great article of the Christian creed in the least degree 
inconsistent with the highest advances of our nine- 
teenth century intelligence. For, in the first place, 
it is grounded on the Azstorical fact of the first coming 
of Christ; that He, the Son of Almighty God, has 
already given this world His personal presence ; that 
He did, eighteen hundred years ago, take upon Him 
our human nature, and was seen and known among 
men. This fact has been substantiated in every trace 
of historical progress since, and verified by every 
advance in historical criticism. So history adds its 
voice to that of prophecy in attesting to the reason- 
ableness of the Christian expectation of the closing 
up of this dispensation by another personal manifes- 
tation of that same Divine Being. And for us, my 
brethren, it is true that our belief in the second 
coming of Christ depends very much on the reality 
of our faith in His incarnation. Faith in the one is 
atest of faith in the other; and one chief reason 
why modern Christians find it hard to believe in the 
personal coming of the Lord in the end of the world’s 
history, is because they have no real conviction of 
the veritableness of His human birth and life in the 
beginning of this dispensation. ‘Their Christianity, 
being simply the product of thcir religious feelings 
and sentiments, with no hold on fact in the past, 
could not be expected to have any hold on fact in 
the future. But there surely should be no such dif- 
ficulty for us, if our faith be in truth, as we profess, 
determined by the Apostles’ Creed and grounded on 
the facts which are plainly asserted therein. 

But this test of our faith goes farther than its re- 


8 bHE WITNESS OF “THE? CAORGH, 


lation to the facts of Christianity, whether historical 
or prophetic; it is, in truth, a real test of our hold 
on Christ Himself by personal faith and love. In 
reading the Epistles and the closing verses of the 
book of Revelations in the New Testament, no one 
can fail to be struck with the evident warmth of 
personal desire in the Apostolic writers for the 
earliest possible return, from Heaven to earth, of the 
Son of God. They were, in looking for Him, like 
one who is eagerly awaiting the return of a friend 
who is so beloved that, without him, life has lost all 
its brightness. In their eagerness, their waiting re- 
quired a constant struggle with impatience, and it 
was evidently hard for them to bear the delay. 
Their tendency and special temptation was, not to 
love the present world too much, nor to become too 
absorbingly engrossed in its interests, but, quite the 
contrary, to count it of so little worth and its con- 
cerns of so little moment as to overlook the unques- 
tionable importance of its responsibilities as the 
probationary state in which the life of every man is 
to be tested and his fitness for the destinies of eter- 
nity determined. 

Now, it is very clear that the most inspiring mo- 
tive, in this their attitude of impatient watching, 
was their intensely fervent love for Christ and their 
all-absorbing desire to be with Him. It is, then,#a 
very serious question for us, if we are conscious—if, 
on an honest self-examination, we are forced to ad- 
mit that we have no desire at all for Christ’s com- 
ing; if we do not care to think of it, and, when it 
is pressed upon our consideration, as it is by the 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 9 


Church at this season, if we rather shrink from it, 
and count it a gloomy subject, like that of death 
and the grave—it is, I say, a very serious question 
whether this state of feeling on our part does not 
imply the absence in us of any real hold on Christ 
and of any genuine personal trust in Him or love 
for Him. 

I pray you, brethren, to ponder that question, and 
carry on your earnest consideration of it into all its 
practical bearings. ‘‘The Lord is not slack con- 
cerning His promise, as some men count slackness ; ” 
and when that promise shall be, as, in His own good 
time and way it assuredly will be, fulfilled, the ful- 
filment will be blissful only to those who shall then 
be found to have been waiting for Him and to “love 
His appearing.” Whether He shall come in the 
first watch, or in the second watch, or in the third, 
He has left with His Church on earth the assurance 
of no benediction but for those to whom His coming 
shall be, not an alarming surprise, but, rather, the 
long-looked for and ardently desired consummation 
of their faith and hope. Oh, well, then, if it be our 
prayer that we may have part in that final blessed- 
ness, should we take to heart now the question, Do 
we /ove His appearing ; and is there in our spirit, as 
we hear His Advent cry, ‘‘ Behold, I come quickly,” 
any such responsive chord as that which thrilled an 
Apostle’s soul and found spontaneous utterance in 
his immediate reply: “‘ Even so, come, Lord Jesus, 
come quickly!” 


IO THE WITNESS OF THE VCHOKCH 


Lis 
THE PCORPOSE AND SCOPE: OF PROPHECY 


Second Sundan in Advent. 


We have also a more sure word of prophecy ; whereunto ye do 
well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, 
until the day dawn and the day-star arise in your hearts.—2 Pet. 
7. IQ. 

A VERY considerable portion of the revelation 
which God has been pleased to make to our race is 
prophetic of events yet in the future, and, especially, 
of that great event to which our attention is now 
directed by the Church,—the second coming of our 
Lord Jesus Christ and the display of His power and 
glory as Universal Judge and King. It is of this 
class of prophecies that the Apostle speaks in the 
text. Having assured his readers that he and his 
fellow Apostles had followed no “ cunningly devised 
fables” when they made known the power and com- 
ing of the Lord Jesus Christ, he states two reasons 
in confirmation of this assertion. The first was, 
that they had already been eye witnesses of a display 
of majesty in Christ, similar to that in which, as they 
were assured, He will appear to judge the world. 
“For,” says the Apostle, “ he received from God the 
Father, honor and glory when there came such a 
voice to Him from the excellent glory. This is my 
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And this 
voice which came from heaven we heard, when we 


FO CHRISTIAN FAL IL. If 


were with Him in the holy mount.” The second 
reason is that given in the text: “ We have also a 
more sure word of prophecy: whereunto ye do well 
that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth ina 
dark place, until the day dawn and the day-star arise 
in your hearts.” Prophecy—by which is obviously 
meant that portion of the prophetic revelations 
which relates to the second coming of Christ, or in 
general, that portion of the prophetic Scriptures 
which is as yet unfulfilled,—he declares to be even 
a “more sure word ” than the proof of sight to him- 
elf, and he exhorts his readers to take heed to it as 
a word equally sure, equally trustworthy and infalli- 
ble for them. 

It is, I need scarcely say to you, my brethren, 
just as sure and trustworthy for us. Heaven and 
earth shall pass away, but one jot or tittle of God's 
word cannot pass away. If He hath said, as we 
know assuredly He hath, that there is “a day ap- 
pointed,” in which His Son shall come to judge the 
world in righteousness, we may be as certain that 
He will come, that we shall be judged by Him, and 
that by that judgment our eternal destiny will be 
determined, as certain as if we saw even now His 
flaming chariot and heard the archangel’s trumpet. 

It is true, however, of the prophetic Scriptures, 
not only as it is of the others, that there are in them 
“some things hard to be understood” which the 
“ jonorant and unstable ” may wrest and pervert, but 
also that there are passages about the meaning of 
which the wisest and best interpreters are by no 
means agreed. So far, indeed, as the great facts of 


I2 THE WITNESS OF VT AL CA CRE 


prophecy are concerned, and especially the fact of 
the second coming of Christ, with its attendant cir- 
cumstances and consequences, there is no occasion 
for doubt or for difference of opinion. The predic- 
tion is so express that no one can receive it with- 
out having the fact set before him as infallibly cer- 
tain. But the prophecies are not mere predictions 
of naked facts. They are scattered profusely, and 
in various forms, over the pages of the inspired vol- 
ume. Sometimes, the form is that of a promise or 
a threat,—for every promise of future bliss, and 
every threatening of future woe, is to such as re- 
ceive it,a prophecy of what the future has in store. 
Sometimes, there is an obscure hint, a mere intima- 
tion; and sometimes, full and particular descriptions. 
Sometimes, prophecies occur where we should least 
expect to find them,—in the midst of an argument, 
or an exhortation, or even a historical narration. 
And, often, they abound in historical allusions, the 
precise object and scope of which are not readily or 
easily seen. Nor is the language in which the 
prophetic predictions are clothed, always free from 
obscurity. On the contrary, the prophecies which 
are the fullest, which open up the most extensive and 
exuberant views of the future state, picture them 
forth, not in the language of clear and life-like de- 
scription, but in the dark speech of allegory and 
symbol. 

It is, therefore, a matter of some difficulty to de- 
termine on what principles such prophecies are to be 
interpreted, and what use we may legitimately make 
of them in constructing the elements of our future 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. ig 


aspirations. Nor isthere agreement on these points 
among those who are cordially united in the belief 
that they are divinely inspired and certain, according 
to their intended meaning, to be fulfilled. 

Some, who are unquestionably sincere and pious, 
think that the prophetic descriptions should be con- 
strued precisely as if they were historical narrations, 
and, accordingly, the scenes and events to which they 
refer are supposed by them to be as accurately 
known as any of the events in the past. The end of 
the present dispensation, with all its circumstances, 
as well as those both preceding and following it, 
are hence spoken of and looked forward to, not only 
as facts which are certain to come to pass, but also 
as scenes with which the descriptions have already 
made us familiar, and which we shall be able at once 
to recognize and identify. The destinies of nations, 
and even of particular individuals, are hence confi- 
dently traced ; revolutions in states, changes in gov- 
ernments, subversions of thrones and destructions 
of dynasties are confidently predicted and looked 
forward to. Even “the times and seasons” are 
thought to be determinable; and some have pre- 
sumed to tell the precise date when prophecy shall 
be fulfilled and the consummation of all things 
brought to pass. 

The extravagances of many who entertain this 
view of the scopeand use of prophecy have led many 
others into an opposite extreme, even to an almost 
entire neglect of the prophetic Scriptures. Seeing the 
strange and discordant conclusions which are drawn 
from them, they doubt the profitableness of attempt- 


14 THE WITNESS OF WIE AGH URC 


ing to study, and scarcely read them. Seeing how 
fallacious is the attempt to get definite conceptions 
from them, and how visionary and extravagant are 
often the results of such attempts, they conclude that 
it is neither our duty nor our privilege to get any 
conceptions at all; and that our safest course is to 
regard them as “sealed books,” and to acquiesce in 
the necessity of ignorance until their meaning shall 
be demonstrated by their fulfilment. 

Now if we consider carefully what the inspired 
Apostle says in our text, I think we shall find it to 
be corrective of both of these views of prophecy, 
and to indicate very clearly the true view. 

I. In correction of the first: the Apostle declares 
prophecy to be “ alight that shineth in a dark place ;” 
and, in the original, the expression translated “a 
dark place” is much stronger than the translation. 
It denotes a place of filth in which the working of 
the mass of corruption beneath sends up continually 
foul and noxious exhalations which render the at- 
mosphere gross and heavy. In such an atmosphere, 
it is evident that a lamp must burn dimly and with 
difficulty; it cannot shed abroad its light, so as to 
make the scene which it is designed to illumine, dis- 
tinct, and clear and bright; but choked and op- 
pressed by the foul atmosphere, it emits a feeble, 
flickering flame that barely serves to relieve the dark- 
ness and to reveal in shadowy indistinctness objects 
which would otherwise be totally invisible and un- 
known. Such, says the Apostle, is the light of 
prophecy in the present dispensation. It is not the 
day-star, much less the sun. It does not and is not 


a a ee oe 


a ee 


TO. CHRISTIAN: FAITH. 15 


designed to lay the future all open before us, and 
make its scenes as palpable and visible to us as those 
of the present and the past; but it is given to us in 
mercy fo relieve the darkness of our natural state, to 
induce us to raise our eyes from this dull earth and 
look forward, earnestly, anxiously, hopefully and 
faithfully towards a future state and a more glorious 
world. 

This account of the limited scope and use of 
prophecy is reasonable as well as scriptural. When 
we reflect upon the subject it seems evident that 
prophecy must, in the very nature of the case, be 
thus obscure. It would not at all comport withthe 
scheme of moral government in which we are at 
present placed to have the future made known to 
us with exactness and definiteness. If, for example, 
the prophecies relating to the incarnation and life 
and death of our Lord had been given in the form 
and order, and with the definiteness and minuteness 
of a historical narration—declaring in unmistakable 
terms just when, where and how, He would be born; 
with whom, and in what circumstances and relations 
He would live; and by whom, and in what manner, 
He would be put to death, with all the facts and cir- 
cumstances—it is plain that the prophecy would 
have defeated its own end, or, at least, that the or- 
dinary laws of moral accountability must have been 
suspended to insure its fulfilment. And so, of 
prophecies relating to any future events in the his- 
tory of the world now, it is obvious that there must 
be a degree of indistinctness and indefiniteness in 
them, so that their subjects may undesignedly, un- 


16 LIE WITNESS SOP VLALS Ci, CaCre 


consciously, and therefore in the full exercise of 
their volition and in accordance with all the condi- 
tions of moral accountability, act for their fulfilment. 
And this, we cannot but remark by the way, is a 
marvellous characteristic of the Scriptural prophe- 
cies, and an irresistible proof of their divine inspira- 
tion, that they are so framed as to possess all this 
requisite indistinctness beforehand, while nothing 
can seem clearer, nothing more unmistakable, after 
they have been fulfilled. 

Another reason why many of the prophecies must 
be obscure is the fact, that they relate to an entirely 
different state from that with which we are at present 
acquainted. The world to which they relate, and 
some of the scenes and events of which they de- 
scribe, is not, like this, material and temporary, but 
it is a world that is spiritual and eternal. We have 
had, and can have, while we remain here, no experi- 
mental knowledge of such a state. “Eye hath not 
seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the 
heart of man” the things which it contains. Of 
necessity, then, we have no language that can cor- 
rectly describe those things. For human language 
is but the expression of human knowledge. Words 
are but the names which have been given to the ob- 
jects of human sight or thought—names by which 
they are known and their images at any time recalled 
and transferred to the apprehension of others. How 
then can a description be given to us of a state 
entirely different from any with which we are ac- 
quainted? Evidently, in order to be perfectly ac- 
curate, it must be given in terms that are applicable 


ee eee | 


LO CHRISTIAN FAITH, 17 


only to such a state, and then, it is as evident that 
it would be utterly unintelligible to us; the terms 
would be as new as the things described; and there- 
fore we should comprehend the one no more than 
the other. That we might not be left in this total 
darkness, God hath graciously condescended to make 
to us some revelations of the future state by em- 
ploying our own language—language which we can 
understand—and applying it to the illustration of 
the scenes which are heavenly and eternal. Just as 
a wise and loving father, when he would raise in his 
children’s minds some conception of scenes which 
they have never witnessed, uses language that is 
familiar to them, employs, that is, the names of 
things which they have witnessed, and thus, by apt 
similes and comparisons, enables their imaginations 
to form pictures and images of the scenes, even so 
our Heavenly Father has condescended, by the 
mouth of His prophets, to employ human language 
for the purpose of raising within our minds some 
conceptions of the spiritual and eternal state. But, 
it is evident that the conceptions which we thus get, 
though they are the best we are at present capable 
of, must be exceedingly imperfect. We cannot see 
as we shall see, nor know as we shall know; but we 
see only “as through a glass, darkly,” and look, not 
upon the realities of the heavenly world, but only 
upon their imperfect and distorted images. This is 
allthat prophecy reveals, and all that it can reveal 
tous. And, therefore, it is not, and must not, be 
deemed the day-star, but only, as the Apostle tells 


us in the text, “a light that shineth zz a@ dark place, 
2 


18 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


until the day dawn, and the day-star arise in your 
hearts.” 

Il. But, should we thence conclude that the 
prophecies are of but little benefit to us, and that 
the diligent study of them is not profitable? 

By no means. The Apostle does not give any 
countenance to such a conclusion. On the contrary, 
he speaks of the prophecies as of very great value, 
as affording the assurance of infallible authority for 
our loftiest aspirations and most glorious hopes. 
Do you not see that this is so? Consider for a mo- 
ment how much is contained in prophetic Script- 
ure. Understanding the term in its full sense, it is 
obvious that much which was once prophetic is now 
historical; and hence we have one of the most con- 
clusive proofs of the truth of Holy Writ. But we do 
not now, as we have already intimated, use the term 
in this sense. We use it, asit is used by the Apostle 
in the text, to denote prophecy which remains yet 
to be fulfilled. And what we ask you is, to consider 
how much we are indebted to that. How much we 
are indebted to it! Oh, it is impossible for any of 
us to get anything like an adequate estimation of 
this. AW that we know in anywise concerning the 
Suture comes from prophecy. Blot out its assurances, 
and the whole of futurity would be to us an absolute 
blank! ‘Vhe Apostle speaks of our natural state in 
this world as “a dark place,” and how dark it would 
then be, it is, and we have great reason to be thank- 
ful that it is, impossible for us now to conceive. We 
could but guess from our knowledge of the history 
of all past generations, that it would be our lot to die ; 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. ie) 


but we should have no hope, and no ground of hope, 
in death. We know now that sin and death will not 
continue to triumph on earth forever; that the 
present state will have, and that soon, an end; that 
the kingdoms and nations of this world have to ac- 
complish the divine purposes, and will then be swept 
away; that the Son of God will come, with power 
and great glory, to judge all mankind according to 
their works; that there will be a new heaven anda 
new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness ; that the 
wise shall shine as stars for ever and ever, and the 
wicked shall be utterly cut off and consigned to 
outer darkness from the presence of the Lord and 
the glory of His power; all this we know now. All 
this we know from prophecy. And, though we do 
not know precisely what is meant by it, though we 
cannot tell how much is implied in it, though our 
conceptions must, necessarily, be very general, and 
imperfect as they are indefinite, yet, we know enough 
to enkindle within us most glorious anticipations, 
and to give usa“ hope that maketh not ashamed,” 
because it cannot be shaken, and faith full of assur- 
ance, that all these anticipations will be infinitely 
more than fulfilled. And we know full well that to 
deprive us of these prophetic assurances would be to 
strip from usat once, the highest, nay, the only true 
consolation in this life and our only source of com- 
fort and support in death. 

Surely, then, we have reason to prize and be very 
thankful for the gift of prophecy, as the light 
which God hath mercifully lighted in this otherwise 
totally dark world, to lighten the wandering chil- 


20 LHE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


dren of Adam towards their heavenly and eternal 
home. 

Having this light, there is no need of argument 
to prove the truth of the Apostle’sdeclaration: “Ye 
do well to take heed” to it; for we must all feel 
that this is at once our bounden duty and our high 
privilege. Let this, then, be our practical conclusion. 
Let us take heed to the word of prophecy with a 
true appreciation of itsscope and design. Let us not 
imagine it to be, as it has not been intended to be, 
anything more than “a light in a dark place,” and, 
therefore, let us not be so presumptuous as to think 
that we can understand its full meaning, nor rely 
upon our inadequate, imperfect, and doubtless, very 
erroneous conceptions, as if they were true images of 
the spiritual realities. But, on the other hand, let 
us avoid the error of those who disregard and 
neglect the prophecies. Knowing that all Scripture 
is given for our instruction, and that this is a very 
important part of Scripture, let it be our endeavor, 
as the Church makes it our prayer, that “ we may so 
read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it, that we 
may learn, and ever hold fast the blessed hope of 
everlasting life.” 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 21 


ITE: 


THE MINISTERIAL COMMISSION DIVINE 
IN ORIGIN AND PERPETUATION. 


Third Sudan in Advent. 


Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did be- 
seech you by us: we pray you, in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to 
God.—2 Cor. v. 20. 


WE have here a man claiming for himself, yet 
clearly not for himself only but in common with 
certain others, this most extraordinary office,—that 
he and the others, to whom he refers, with him, were 
commissioned ambassadors from God Most High in 
Heaven to their fellow men on earth; soauthorita- 
tively commissioned, that their official utterances 
were to be received as though God Himself were 
heard speaking, and the terms offered by them as the 
terms of a compact divinely appointed and ratified. 

There can be no question that this is substantially 
the claim here put forth. And now the point is to 
see how a claim of so extraordinary a nature and so 
high in its pretensions can be substantiated or ac- 
credited. Plainly, it would seem, in but one or the 
other of two ways: cither, by direct revelation,— 
the person claiming it asserting that he had been 
taken up into the councils of the Most High and 
miraculously invested with the commission ; or else, 
that, in the divine economy, an order of this rep- 
resentative nature had been duly constituted,—of 


22 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


which order the individual claimant professed to be 
a legitimately authorized member. 

If St. Paul were here speaking for himself only, it 
might be at once conceded that the claim rested on 
the direct revelation to him of the Lord Jesus Christ 
from heaven, and the special, personal commission, 
which was given to him in that revelation. But, 
very clearly and unquestionably, he is not speaking 
of himself only or personally, but, as we have already 
said, of himself in common with certain others and 
as a representative of these others. The plural 
pronoun, “we,” is not used, either for the modest 
avoidance of apparent egotism, or as an official con- 
ventionalism, but, clearly, in its true, literal sense as 
referring to an order of men of whom the Apostle 
claimed to be a representative. Of this order it is 
that he makes the declaration in the text: “Now 
then, we are ambassadors for Christ as though God 
did beseech you by us.” 

And now, brethren, I need not remind you that 
the continuous, perpetual existence of such duly 
commissioned representatives of God, on earth, is 
held in the Church to be a fundamental, consti- 
tutional provision of the Christian economy. But, 
since a consistent adhesion to this faith is a very 
marked characteristic of the Church whose minis- 
trations we receive, and since, on this account, the 
attitude of our Church is thought by many to be 
illiberal and unnecessarily exclusive,—as making for 
itself pretensions which are not charitable or war- 
ranted either by Scripture, by history, or by sound 
reason,—it is worth while for us to take into careful 


LOUCHATS 2 TAN PATH. 23 


reconsideration the principles which are at issue in 
this claim, and plainly involved in its steadfast and 
uncompromising maintenance. 

In the first place, then, let it be noticed that the 
attitude of our Church in relation to the ministry 
is precisely that which is universally admitted in re- 
lation to the Bible as the Book of Divine Revelation. 

All Christians, at least all who can be said, in any 
true sense, to hold the Christian faith, are agreed that 
the Bible is essentially different from all other books, 
in that it is divine, while they are only human; it 
contains the special revelations of God, and they 
contain only human assertions, reasonings, specula- 
tions, or imaginings. When we say that the Bible, 
as the authentic record of the special revelations 
which have been made of God from the beginning of 
the world down to the introduction of the Gospel, is 
a very old book , that part of it was written over 
three thousand years, and its last chapters nearly 
two thousand years ago; that its genuine, authentic 
integrity has been preserved through all these many 
years and ages; that, notwithstanding the darkness 
of the Middle Ages and the corruption which over- 
spread all Christendom, the books of the Bible were 
still most scrupulously preserved and copied; and 
that, since the invention of printing and the revival 
of learning, it is, notwithstanding the multiplication, 
by millions upon millions, of its copies, and its trans- 
lations into all languages, still essentially the same; 
so that, when we take up and read this Holy Bible, 
we are certain that we are reading, substantially and 
veritably, what the inspired Apostles and prophets 


24 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


wrote, and what Christians in all ages and nations 
have received as the Word of Life—when, I say, we 
assert all this, we are asserting only what all but in- 
fidels hold to be unquestionably true. Moreover, all 
Christians hold that all this must necessarily be so; 
that no modern production can, by any possibility, 
be the Bible, or may be substituted for the Bible ; 
and that, even if, in any case, the Bible were lost, or 
a number of persons were placed,—as, for instance, 
on an island in the ocean,—so that they could not 
obtain a copy of the Bible, their duty would be to 
remember and record as much of it as they could; 
but not for a moment to think of making a new 
Bible, or of using their imperfect copy any longer 
than the exigence of their situation should abso- 
lutely compel. 

Now, if all this be conceded to be true in regard 
to the Bible, is there not good reason in holding pre- 
cisely the same principles in relation to the Christian 
ministry ? The Bible is of divine origin ; and is not 
the ministerial office likewise essentially divine? If 
no man, or body of men, can, in our modern age, 
make a book to take the place of the Bible, is there 
any more authority in any man or body of men to 
originate a new Christian ministry? It is admitted 
as obviously and unquestionably true, that the Bible 
must be from two to four thousand years old, be- 
cause it contains the contemporaneous historical rec- 
ords of the revelations which were made so long 
ago; and, on the same principle, must not the office 
of the ministry have its foundation on an old com- 
mission,—the commission given by Christ, the Son 


LO; CHRISTIAN? FATIL. 25 


of God Himself, when He was on earth, eighteen hun- 
dred years ago? There is no doubt that the authen- 
tic integrity of the Bible has been preserved through 
all the ancient, and middle, and modern ages; and 
this confidence is grounded, partly on a legitimate 
trust in God’s providential care to preserve His truth, 
and partly on historical evidence of the fact; and 
why, then, should any one doubt the possibility or the 
fact of the preservation of the ministerial office, on 
the same principles, and by the same means? To 
say the truth, there is more reason—clearer and 
stronger ground—for confidence in the historical in- 
tegrity of the ministerial office, than of the sacred 
volume. For, when in the dark ages, the faith of 
the Church was corrupted by superstition, there 
must have been, to the monastic priests who copied 
the sacred manuscripts, many a strong temptation 
to alter here a word and there a verse, so that it 
might square with their belief; but there was no 
such temptation to interpolate or to change in min- 
isterial ordinations. If it be said, as it may with 
truth, that their very superstition would have made, 
and no doubt did make, them the more scrupulously 
careful in preserving every letter and syllable of the 
Bible; it may be claimed with equal truth that the 
same superstition would have made them not less 
scrupulous in adhering most steadfastly to the 
received rules and established usages for continuing 
the apostolic succession of the ministry. The case 
is strengthened still more when we remember that 
the uncorrupted preservation of the sacred volume 
is guaranteed by no express promise ; while we have 


26 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


a special assurance from Christ Himself that “ the 
gates of hell” shall “never prevail” for the destruc- 
tion of His Church, and a direct promise that He 
will be with His ministers of apostolic succession, 
‘always, even unto the end.” 

But if any one doubt whether there be, in truth, 
the same reason for insisting on a historical adhe- 
rence to the line of ministerial ordinations from Christ 
that there is for insisting on the preservation of the 
old inspired Scriptures, let him consider what the 
ministerial office claims,—what, in accordance with 
the plainest declarations of the Word of God, it must 
claim,—to be and do. Whenever and wherever any 
man assumes the functions of this office, he must 
dare to say, he must be able to say: “Now then, 
we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God 
did beseech you by us, we pray you in Christ’s 
stead.” 

“‘ Ambassadors for Christ’! “In Christ’s stead ”! 
—that is, in His place and with His authority, speak- 
ing as if He spoke, and pleading with men as if God 
Himself were pleading! Oh, one should indeed 
shrink from the presumption of such a claim, unless 
he were quite sure of the authentication of his com- 
mission from Christ Himself. But the ministerial 
claim does not stop here. It would be comfortless 
indeed if it might not go further. When one claim- 
ing to be an ambassador of Christ calls upon his fel- 
low men to repent and turn to God, they have good 
reason to ask not only if he have authority from Christ 
to make this call, but also if on their compliance with 
it, he have any authority to assure them of the di- 


LO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 27 


vine forgiveness. They may say, they would say, if 
they were thoroughly in earnest: “ This is a matter 
of life and death with us: we cannot see God: we 
cannot hear His voice; He is in heaven, far above 
all creatures, but we feel that we are sinners against 
Him, and that we deserve His wrath. Now, you 
claim to be an ambassador from Him to us; and as 
such call upon us to repent and seek forgiveness. 
Flave you any authority from Him to assure us of 
Fis forgiveness? Can you give us any trustworthy 
title to salvation from the penalties of our sinfulness 2” 
The answer in accordance with the New Testament 
Scriptures must be: “ Yes, we have such authority. 
We are commissioned to administer a sacrament 
which Christ the Son of God Himself instituted for 
just this purpose,—to admit men into His Church 
and invest them consequently with all its covenanted 
grace. Therefore we say in inspired language: ‘ Re- 
pent, and be baptized for the forgiveness of your 
sins, and ye shall receive the Holy Ghost.’ More- 
over, in this Church there are divinely appointed 
means of grace, which if faithfully used will enable 
you to go on unto perfection, until you shall be made 
‘meet for the inheritance of the saints in light.’ 
Beside its reading and teaching of the Word of God 
and its sacrifices of prayer and praise, it has also an- 
other sacrament, which we are commissioned to admin- 
ister, in which Christ Himself imparts the strengthen- 
ing and sanctifying efficacy of His own most holy and 
immortal life. He will make you partakers of His 
own blessed body and blood; and so as the Father 
is in Him, will He dwell in you, making you ‘mem- 


28 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


bers of His Body, and therefore one with Him as He 
and the Father are One!’”’ 

When such a claim has been made,—the claim 
which every one assuming to be a minister of Christ 
in that very assumption does make,—have not peo- 
ple an indisputable right to demand some trust- 
worthy authentication of so high a commission ? 
Should they not answer: “This is a glorious mes- 
sage to us 2f it be true; but how can we know that it 
as true? What evidence have we that you have re- 
ceived such a commission from the Son of God 
tous??? 

When this is asked, is ita sufficient answer for the 
man exercising ministerial functions, to say: “I am 
sincerely persuaded in my own mind and heart that 
God has called me to be His minister.” Surely not. 
His fellow men, to whom he presumes to minister, 
might say to him, they ought to say: “ That is no 
satisfactory proof tous. You may be mistaken; men 
often are in their thoughts and feelings. But, even 
if you are not mistaken in that respect, your self- 
persuasion that you ought to be an ambassador for 
Christ, or that you have been called by the influences 
of spiritual grace to enter into that office, this, how- 
ever sincere, does not make you His ambassador. 
A man may be sincerely persuaded that he is called 
by divine Providence to be an ambassador from the 
ruler of one nation to another, but the persuasion 
would not make him an ambassador or give him any 
power to offer terms of peace or war. An ambassa- 
dorship is an office; and no man may exercise its 
authority unless he is duly commissioned and can 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 29 


authenticate his commission before those to whom 
he is sent. So, the Christian ministry is an office; 
and the sacred functions which are performed in 
it demand, not only sincerity in the heart of the 
minister, but, none the less, a commission from 
Christ, to prove that he has His authority, and can 
truly assure his fellow men of the divine terms and 
admit them to the divine provisions of grace.” 

Well, then, would it be sufficient for him to say: 
“T have such a commission; I have been ordained, 
and thus constituted a minister of Christ!” So far 
as it goes this assurance is unquestionably satisfac- 
tory. But, must there not be another assurance 
behind it? By whose ordination was the commission 
conferred? The claim is to be az ambassador of 
Christ. And, as no one, since His ascension to 
Heaven, can pretend to an ordination directly from 
Him, but through His commissioned ministers, it 
must be an essential point to determine how the 
ordainers received their commission and how the 
delegating authority has been authenticated both to 
themselves and to others. 

Now, when these questions are asked, and they 
are surely questions which people have a right to 
ask of their ministers, and would ask if they were 
thoroughly and intelligently in earnest on the sub- 
ject, it is difficult to see how a satisfactory reply can 
be made, except by adducing the original commission 
of Christ to His Apostles, together with reasonable 
evidence that the ordination has come by legitimate 
historical succession, from that commission. 

This, then, my brethren, and simply this, is the 


30 LHE WITNESS*OL THE CHURCH 


ground on which the Church holds and recognizes the 
ministerial commission. It was the doctrine and 
position of Christendom universally for fifteen hun- 
dred years, and if in these modern days, though still 
true of nine-tenths of Christendom, it be not so uni- 
versally ; if we are surrounded by Christian denom- 
inations of confessedly modern origin, and whose 
ministers, however excellent in character and ability, 
do not even claim historical connection with the 
original apostolic commission, it is surely they and 
not we, that are the separatists; they and not we 
that have gone out from the line of succession. We 
know the plea of necessity, on which, in the Conti- 
nental Reformation, this departure was excused. 
We freely acknowledge their piety and their worth. 
We thank God for every manifestation of His grace 
through their instrumentality, and would have noth- 
ing in our feelings, as there is not in our position, 
that conflicts with the apostolic prayer for “ grace, 
mercy, and peace, upon all who love our Lord, Jesus 
Christ, in sincerity ;” but, what we deem essential 
for ourselves, we surely ought to require from others, 
viz: An authentication of the claim to be an ambassa- 
aor of Christ by a commission which is legitimately 
traceable to Christ Himself. And a steadfast and 
uncompromising adhesion to this fundamental 
church principle seems to us to be specially “ needful 
for these times.” If anew church can be made and 
a new ministry constituted by men, why not a new 
Bible? If those who profess and call themselves 
Christians may laugh at the presumption of a claim 
now to historical participation in the old, original, 


FORCHRISTIANY FALL. 31 


ministerial commission; why may they not laugh at 
the alleged absurdity of an implicit credence of such 
an old book as the Bible? And do they not? Has 
it not actually come to this? Oh, do not the devel- 
opments of our modern Christianity invest with fear- 
ful significance the question of our Lord: “ When 
the Son of man cometh shall He find fazth on the 


earth?” 
‘ Dear Lamb of God! I know full well, 

All power to Thee was given, 

And, Oh, there is none other name, 
To name us, under Heaven ! 

I know when Thou didst send a line 
Through all the world to run, 

No arm of flesh, if that hath failed, 
Can weave a surer one ! 

Thou Priest and Prophet both for us, 
Art Priest above in Heaven : 

But, to Apostles still on earth 
Thy prophet power is given: 

Thank God, it never failed, nor shall, 
That long, unbroken chain ! 

Begun in Thee, in Thee shalt end— 
When Thou shalt come again.” 


32 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


IV. 


THE REVELATION OF THE JUDGMENT 
DAY. 


Sourth Sundan in Advent. 


Because He hath appointed a day in which He will judge the 
world in righteousness by that Man whom He hath ordained ; where- 
of He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised him 
from the dead.—Acts, xvzz. 31. 


Tus is one of the many texts in the New Tes- 
tament which plainly assert that there is to be a final 
judgment at which all mankind shall be called to 
render account for the deeds of this life, whether 
good or bad. Reason and conscience anticipate this 
final accountability and concur in recognizing it as 
a necessity in the ultimate vindication of the divine 
justice and the reign of perfect righteousness. But 
I propose now, not to take up the argument which 
is based on such considerations, but simply to lay 
before you, as clearly as I may be able, the truths in 
relation to this most momentous subject which are 
plainly asserted in the divinely inspired Scriptures. 
It is, indeed, unquestionably true that the best, the 
wisest and holiest thinkers, in all ages of Christen- 
dom, have held these revealed truths to be most 
consistent with the principles of reason and the antic- 
ipations of conscience; but the fundamental ques- 
tion for us, in relation to any matter of faith, is: 
What saith the Word of God? “To the law and to 
the testimony, if they speak not according to this 
word, it is because there is no light in them.” 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 33 


Beginning, then, with the recognition of the ex- 
plicit assertion of the text, which is clearly substan- 
tiated by many other passages of Holy scription, 
that there isa Judgment Day appointed, and that 
this appointed judgment is to be after the end of our 
life here on earth, it is a question of no slight in- 
terest whether the teaching of revelation warrants 
us to suppose that the judgment will be passed 
upon every individual, separately, immediately after 
death ; or, to look forward to a general dispensation 
of just rewards and punishments after the world 
anc human life in it shall have accomplished their 
purpose and come to an end. 

The opinion is very commonly entertained in 
modern Protestantism that the judgment is passed 
upon every individual immediately after death. But 
whence this originated and how it has come to be 
so generally received it is difficult to imagine. For 
it was certainly not the belief of Christians in the 
first and purest ages of the Church, and is not con- 
sistent with the representations of the judgment 
which are given in Holy Writ. Instead of such 
countless and incessant individual judgments, it is 
very clearly asserted in many passages that there is 
a time appointed when all who have ever lived shall 
be summoned together, and on that great occasion 
one and all judged and sentenced. The assertion 
of the inspired Apostle, in the text, that “God hath 
appointed a day in the which He will judge the world 
in righteousness,” is very explicit; and, in accord- 
ance with it, the time of the judgment is frequently 
spoken of by the inspired writers both of the Old 

3 


34 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


and New Testaments as “ the great and terrible day of 
the Lord.’ The judgment, moreover, is plainly rep- 
resented as a judgment before which all must stand, 
and in which all must be tried. Thus it stands as 
the recorded language of our Lord Himself in terms — 
so plain as to leave no apparent ground for possible 
misunderstanding: “When the Son of Man shall 
come in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, 
then shall He sit upon the throne of His glory, and 
before Him shall be gathered all nations: And He 
shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd 
divideth his sheep from the goats. And He shall 
set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on 
the left.” That this gathering of all nations is to in- 
clude every individual not only then found among the 
living, but all likewise who from the very beginning 
of mortality shall have died, is clear from the closing 
revelation made to St. John. For his declaration is 
this: “I saw a great white throne, and Him that sat 
on it, from whose face earth and heavensfled away : 
And there was found no place for them. And I 
saw the dead, small and great, stand before God. 
And the books were opened: And another Book 
was opened, which is the Book of Life. And the 
dead were judged out of those things which were 
written in the books, according to their works. And 
the sea gave up the dead which were in it: and 
death and hell delivered up the dead which were in 
them. And they were judged, every man according 
to their works.” If, then, we derive our faith, not 
from conjectures or suppositions, but from the ex- 
plicit declarations of the inspired Word, we may 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 35 


hold this as one certain conclusion, that the final 
judgment is not passed upon individuals at the mo- 
ment of death, but is reserved unto a time deter- 
mined and appointed by the Most High, when it is 
to be universal, including every individual that has 
ever lived from the beginning of the world. 

But then the question is raised for us: what, and 
where, is the state of the departed before the Judg- 
ment Day? And it is a question of very deep and 
solemn interest. It touches ourselves in a vital 
point, and involves our closest and dearest relations. 
We have lost those who were very near and dear to 
us: death came and took them from our sight. 
Where are they now? And when we shall be called 
to follow them, when Death shall lay his cold hand 
upon us and take us, as he has taken them, from 
earth, into what state, and where, shall we be taken? 

Many, as we have already implied, would give as 
the answer to these questions, that those who die 
in the Lord, such as are called in Scripture the right- 
eous, are received immediately on their death into 
the society of God and the angels in Heaven; and 
that the wicked are consigned at once to their eter- 
nal place of misery. But, if it be, as we have seen 
it is, clearly the teaching of revelation that the souls 
of the departed are reserved into a judgment in the 
future, and if the very object of that judgment is 
to try their characters, in order to determine and 
make manifest for what state,—_-whether of Heaven 
or of Hell—they are fit; then, surely, it is not sup- 
posable that the final sentence can have been passed 
and the award actually carried into effect before that 


36 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


judgment shall have been held? What could be 
more incongruous than the summoning together of 
those who have been, for ages, in the actual enjoyment 
of Heaven with those who had been, as long, in the 
actual suffering of that which Scripture designates 
as Hell, to be judged, and to have their characters and 
states then, as if they had not been already, and 
long before, determined! Besides, if the judgment 
is to be zz the body, and if its awards can only, as 
Scripture declares, be perfected in the body, there 
must be a general resurrection before the judgment, 
and soul and body are to be reunited for the happi- 
ness or misery of eternity. 

It being impossible, then, to reconcile with the 
scriptural revelation of the last judgment, this idea 
of an immediate entrance of the departed into the 
final abode of happiness or misery, there is an 
opinion prevalent among some Christians, and by 
one corrupt church,—the Church of Rome—made 
an article of faith, that, beside “the blackness of 
darkness,” to which the wicked are consigned, there 
is a place of purgatorial confinement and torment, 
in which venial, that is, pardonable, sins are burned 
away, and souls, which cn the whole are righteous, 
but not perfect, are made by suffering fit for that 
glorious kingdom into which they are finally to be 
received. And accordingly, it is held that all right- 
eous souls, excepting only the very few who are 
worthy to be ranked as saints, must pass from this 
life into that purgatorial state, and can attain to 
heaven at last only through the sufficient endurance 
of its discipline and suffering. 


TO” CHRISTIAN FAITH. 37 


“Tf there were any good reason for this belief, we 
should certainly have a very sad and depressing pros- 
pect before us; watch and pray and struggle as we 
might, yet after all to have to pass from the sorrows 
of this life, from its weariness and its pains, into a 
second and a worse trial!’”* We might indeed 
admit, and no doubt should admit if we could see 
as God sees, that our sins deserve an eternal punish- 
ment. But still, the contemplation of such a pros- 
pect would be, as concerning ourselves, very discour- 
aging and frightful, and as concerning our departed 
loved ones, very discomforting and distressing. And, 
therefore, we thank God that we have not so learned 
the truth as it is in Jesus, nor been so instructed in 
the way of salvation which is revealed as secured by 
His meritorious righteousness and sealed by the 
covenant of grace to all who are departed in the true 
faith of His holy name. 

There is yet a third opinion, which it seems al- 
most a profanation to mention in the ministration 
of the sanctuary, but which yet we cannot omit to 
take notice of now, because it has attained a mar- 
vellous currency in our day; and that is, the notion 
that the spirits of the dead are left in a state of 
uncertainty and perplexity, not knowing at first 
whether they are in this world or another, in death 
or in life, but struggling, as they find themselves in 
a spiritual state, to regain communion and _ inter- 
course with the material world. There is so much 
that is shocking, and at the same time absurd, in 
this notion, that its reception into any intelligent, 


* Newman’s Par. Ser. vol. 1. p. 663. 


38 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH. 


not to say Christian, mind, would be inconceivable, 
were we not constrained, as we are at the present 
time, to witness it in many cases, as an actually ex- 
isting fact. 

But, turning from this, as from the other opinions 
noticed, we take up again the Scriptures of revealed 
truth and ask what they teach in relation to the 
present, and until the Judgment Day, the future, 
state of the dead. Nor do we ask in vain. Much, 
indeed, which our curiosity would fain inquire into is 
hidden from us; but enough is revealed to sustain 
faith and hope, to afford very great and precious 
comfort in our adversities and bereavements, and to 
show us how to live and how to die in meek prepara- 
tion for an eternity of holiness and bliss. First, we 
are assured, that, when the body returns unto dust, 
the spirit returns unto God who gave it. It is, then, 
not lost; not left to wander up and down the uni- 
verse in darkness and perplexity ; not left to struggle 
for and devise expedients, which in the flesh it 
would have disdained, to regain the society and 
companionship of this earthly life. It returns to 
God who gave it; and in His keeping it surely re- 
tains both its consciousness and its intelligence. 
Next, we are assured that a// the spirits of the dead 
are thus in God’s keeping, in reservation for the 
great day of resurrection and final judgment. It is 
very expressly said that the spirits of the wicked, 
such as have done despite unto the spirit of grace, 
are reserved until that day to be punished; reserved, 
it seems clearly to be taught, in dreadful conscious- 
ness of unpardoned sin, and in a state of wretched- 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 39 


ness which is described, figuratively it may be, but 
if figurative, surely not without some basis in awfu] 
reality, as that of “chains and darkness” with the 
“angels who kept not their first estate.” * 

On the other hand, the assurance is given to us in 
testimony even more abundant and explicit, that 
the souls of the righteous, washed and made clean 
in the blood of the Lamb, are reserved in Paradise, an 
intermediate state of blissful rest, where no torment 
can touch them, and where they are assured of the 
divine presence and approbation, and know that 
there is a crown of righteousness laid up for them 
to be given them by the Lord, the righteous Judge, 
and, with them, to all who love His appearing, in 
the Judgment Day.t+ 

Such, as we are taught by the Church from Holy 
Scripture, is that which we are to believe respecting 
the intermediate state of the dead; a doctrine 
which is full of comfort if we are trying to walk 
honestly, and of warning, if we have fallen into the 
error of the wicked; and which we may not, and 
certainly would not, relinquish for either the gloomy 
purgatorial dogma of papal superstition or the fan- 
tastic theories of modern infidelity. But we are as- 
sured that the intermediate state is not final. It 
must end when time ends. It is but the other side 
of the incompleteness of human history which is the 
characteristic of the present dispensation; and so, 


the souls of the martyrs who are in that state, are 
~ hs avs hag hal ABS BSUS A i eee ee 


7 C/. St. Luke, xxiii. 43; 2 Cor. -xii. 2-5 ee REVe Tgoe st Phat 
1, 23;° Rey. vi. 9-12. 


4O THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


represented in the book of Revelations, as crying 
out with a holy impatience, How long, O Lord, holy 
and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood 
on them that dwell on the earth? (Rev. vi. 10). 
The same divine revelation assures us, as it assured 
them, that it is yet but “for a season, “a little 
while,” when “the number of the elect shall be 
filled up,” the purposes, which, in the counsels of 
the Most High, determined the existence and condi- 
tions of the present dispensation shall all have been 
accomplished, and then cometh the great judgment, 
in which all human history shall be equitably summed 
up and every individual man that has had his part and 
made his own character, whether for good or evil, in 
this history, shall, according to that character, re- 
ceive for an eternal existence his just recompense of 
reward. God has told us plainly in His holy word, 
who is the appointed Judge, and what shall be 
the terrible majesty of His appearing. We are as- 
sured, and blessed be His name for the assurance, 
that He hath committed all judgment unto His Son; 
and that, for the infinitely gracious reason that our 
redemption hath been purchased with His blood. 
We look for His appearing “in majesty and great 
glory,” enthroned “in the clouds of heaven,” and 
surrounded by all the angelic hosts. We are warned 
that no man knoweth when that coming of the 
Judge shall be, but, that when He cometh it shall 
be “suddenly,’)as that-of “a thief in the nigitaes 
the lightning’s flash from one part of heaven unto 
the other. It is foretold that “all the dead” shall 
be summoned from their graves. But not in the 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. AI 


regions of the dead alone will that summons be 
heard. Then, as now, a part of the great family of 
mankind, “every one” of whom must be judged, will 
be living on this earth. And when that day shall 
come, it is declared that these “shall not prevent,” 
that is, go before “them which are asleep;” but, 
they “shall be changed in a moment, in the twink- 
ling of an eye, at the last trump;” and their “ cor- 
ruptible bodies shall put on incorruption,” and their 
“mortal shall put on immortality.” And they 
‘shall be caught up to meet the Lord in the air;”’ 
and, together with them, “the sea shall give up the 
dead that are therein; and the earth shall give 
up the dead therein; and death and hell,” the 
places where the departed, both bodies and souls, 
are reserved, “shall deliver up the dead which are 
in them; and they shall be judged, every man ac- 
cording to his works.” 

Are we authorized to go further? Is there any 
disclosure in the divine revelation of human destiny 
of the possible destiny of every one of us—beyond ? 
Of our possible destiny for Eternity ? 

Can we deny or doubt it ? This judgment “ accord- 
ing to our works,” what can it mean but the awarding 
of eternal destiny to every individual with impartial 
and unerring certainty, according to hts character ? 
Mmnd,.as) it isytrue. that)\the “individual character 
of every one of us is continually in the process of 
formation throughout the whole term of our life on 
earth, and the completed result is just that which we 
must each one stand in, and be held individually 
responsible for in the judgment ; and, as character 


42 THE WITNESS (Ol GTA (CH ORCH 


so completed must be good or bad, true or false, 
righteous or wicked, what wonder is it, even to the 
apprehension of our own reason and conscience, that 
the Scriptures reveal to us two, and but two, states 
beyond the judgment; and that these two states 
are as opposite in nature and condition as Heaven 
and Hell? 

So much, which isall that is needful for practical 
guidance in working out our eternal salvation, we 
can surely understand. We may not be able to 
comprehend the process, or tell the duration, of the 
judgment; the “day” of judgment, we know, can- 
not be a literal day of twenty-four hours’ duration, 
because it is expressly foretold that the judgment 
shall.be heralded by an angel, who shall declare that 
“time,” that is, time as we reckon it, “shall be no 
longer.” It may prove to be au entire dispensation, 
as long as, or even longer than the present. Nor 
need this perplex us. For, in common use, as well 
as in Scripture, any period that is definitely desig- 
nated iscalled “a day.” For example, when we read, 
or hear it said: “this is a day of rejoicing,’ or “of 
sorrow,” we have no thought of the sun’s rising and 
setting, but simply of the time as affected by the 
blessing or affliction. When you are told from the 
pulpit that this is your “ day of probation,” you un- 
derstand, if you understand correctly, the reference 
to be not to the diurnal period then passing, but to 
the whole term of this mortal life. And when you 
are told, this is your “day of grace,” the word ex- 
tends, not to asingle hour, or even moment, beyond 
that in which the announcement is made. In one 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 43 


sense, indeed, the whole of the present dispensation 
of the world, including all the ages from the Incarna- 
tion of the Redeemer till His final advent, may be 
called “the day of grace,” as denoting the period in 
which the divine government of the world is specially 
manifested as a dispensation of grace, through the 
Gospel of the Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ ; while, 
in relation to the probation of each individual, there 
is no assurance of a single hour beyond the present, 
no promise of even a single moment for repentance 
beyond that which is stamped as, simply, zozw. With 
precisely the same propriety, then, it may be pre- 
sumed that the “day of judgment” will be @ dzs- 
pensation in which the characteristic mantfestation of 
the divine government will be, not asin the present 
dispensation, the probationary abeyance of rewards 
and punishments, but the perfectly righteous and 
universally accredited recognition aud award of every 
person sreal character, whether tt be good or bad. So 
the books to be “ opened’”’ may denote the divine 
process of disclosing all the hidden secrets of life and 
bringing both the deeds and the principles of every 
man’s character into light. The seztence may be the 
divinely determined process of developing human 
character into absolute fitness of condition. And then 
the final result of such developed adjustment, the 
eternal existence as good or bad in Heaven or in 
hell! Oh, we shall all understand, by and by, just 
what this means. But let it be granted that our 
apprehension of it must be but very imperfect and 
defective now—that “ everlasting” isa period which 
our understanding cannot grasp; that the descrip- 


44 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


tions both of Heaven and of Hell are descriptions 
of states beyond our present ken; that we cannot 
determine precisely how much is figurative and how 
much may be real—but still, after all such possible 
allowance, the one great fact of momentous interest 
to us stands clear and indubitable: that the eternal 
states revealed are two, and but two; and that our 
own individual character—this, and nothing else—is 
to determine in which of these opposite states we 
shall have our eternal existence. Life and death 
are before us. We may have either the one or the 
other. But, if there be any truth in the plainest dec- 
larations of God’s Word, nay, if there be any truth 
in human life and development, if living means any- 
thing, if character has any moral quality and in- 
volves any real personal responsibility, then it is cer- 
tain that the alternative is proposed to us, and that 
every one of us must choose for himself, and by his 
choice, in its practical outworking, determine which 
he will have for his eternal allotment. 

If our choice be on the side of falsehood, of moral 
corruption and spiritual wickedness, it is a terrible, 
but most certain, truth, that there is no salvation 
revealed as possible for us. But, on the other hand, 
if our choice be for the truth and the right, no as- 
surance can be made more sure than that of the Life 
Everlasting, which is made and sealed to us by the 
sure word of God Himself in the covenant of His 
grace. Let the revelation of that glorious destiny 
be the closing words of our meditation now: ‘“ And 
there shall be no more curse; but the throne of God 
and of the Lamb shall bein it. And His servants 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 45 


shall serve Him, and they shall see His face, and 
His name shall be in their foreheads. And there 
shall be no night there; and they shall need no 
candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God 
giveth them light ; and they shall reign for ever and 
ey dg 


46 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


V. 
OF LIVING FOR THE JUDGMENT. 


Advent. 


Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, 
who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will 
make manifest the counsels of the hearts ; and then shall every man 
have praise of God, —1 Cor. tv. 5. 


THIS text is as noteworthy for what it implies as 
for what it explicitly says. The Apostle, in writing 
it, was referring to the divisions of sentiment and 
opinion, of which there was manifest evidence, in 
the Corinthian Church, and which had already 
begun to break up its members into opposing 
parties in relation to their apostolic pastors and 
teachers. St. Paul was quite aware that he himself 
was included in this division of sentiment; that some 
claimed to be especially his friends and admirers, 
while others gave the preference to Cephas or 
Apollos. But in writing to them he gives expression 
to no personal feeling. He tells them, indeed, that 
it was “a very small thing” that he should be 
judged of them or of man’sjudgment ; that he didn’t 
even care to judge himself. What he wanted was 
to get them grounded and settled, where he was, on 
the great principle of ving for the divine judgment. 
That was infallible, and was sure in God’s ap- 
pointed time to be visited on every person with 
all his work, and to determine, with absolutely im- 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 47 


partial and unerring certainty, the precise character 
of both the one and the other, whether good or 
bad. 

Now, the phraseology which refers to this rule of 
living for the divine judgment has come to be 
familiar to us all, and the principle is one of the 
accepted commonplaces of Christianity. The truth 
of a judgment to come is an old truth now; but in 
the time of the Apostle it was new and had all the 
vitality of a truth just revealed. When the Apostle 
spoke of looking for the coming of the Lord to 
judge the world in righteousness, he spake of that 
which to him was something very real and certain. 
The Lord had been seen and known among men in 
the person of Jesus Christ. His life with them had 
been a veritable fact ; as unquestionable and verifi- 
able as that of any other person whom they had 
known and with whom they had lived and conversed. 
He had gone away; but with the express assurance, 
repeatedly made, that He would return in the full 
manifestation of His divine glory, to call all, both 
quick and dead, to give their final account for the 
verdict of His infallible judgment. Some think that 
the primitive Christians, and even the Apostles, ex- 
pected His coming, for this decisive purpose, within 
a short time, and even in their own generation. 
There are passages in the Epistles which can hardly 
be reconciled with this supposition; but it is no 
matter whether they were mistaken on this point or 
not. The duration of time between the first and 
second coming of Christ was not, in their estimation, 
and is not in fact, the matter of consequence. The 


48 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


point was, and is, zts certainty and its constant and 
enevasible liabtlity. The practical point was, that the 
judgment, come when it might, was to be the judg- 
ment of every one of them; that to it they were to 
be personally accountable for everything done in the 
body, —and, therefore that for it, and with undeviat- 
ing regard to its revealed conditions, they should 
constantly live. 

My brethren, this is precisely the Christian atti- 
tude for all in all time. This principle of living 
for the judgment to come is really one of the first 
principles of the Christian religion, and it is insep- 
arably connected with faith in Christ as the world’s 
Redeemer. To say that we ought to be living under 
this expectation and on this principle is simply to 
say that we should be living as Christians; that 
our thoughts and motives should be those which the 
Christian revelation consistently inspires and sug- 
gests. 

But we must all be conscious, and those who are 
most thoughtful in the matter the most regretfully 
so, that the vital freshness of the early faith has 
long since died out, and that in our modern life there 
is need of all the help we can get in the Church’s 
Advent season to enkindle in our minds a real ap- 
prehension of the coming of Christ to be our judge ; 
much more, to bring the recognition of its certainty 
and of our certain liability to it into our daily life 
and conduct, as a predominant motive. 

Consider now what would be its practical effect 
upon our life here, how it would brighten and elevate 
it, and what an invigorating purpose it would steadily 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. A9 


hold us to in passing through the world’s mutations 
and tribulations. 

In the first place, it is a revelation of light. It 
shows us what is the true end and purpose of life, 
and gives us the only clue that is at all satisfactory 
amid the perplexities of the tangled web in which 
every path of our mortal state is meshed. Without 
this revelation of a judgment to come there is no 
worthy or consistent purpose in human existence as 
it is experienced in the world. Not one human 
being of the myriads who from the beginning of time 
have peopled the earth, has been able to feel that 
he has fulfilled such a purpose, on the supposition 
that life here is “the be all and end all” of exist- 
ence. The universal feeling is that of dissatisfaction 
growing out of a sense of capabilities for whose 
development and effective realization there is here 
no proper sphere, no adequate time or scope. This 
would be true, even if all were certain of living to the 
utmost limit of the earthly life, and if, in the whole 
duration of that term, all the fortunes and circum- 
stances of life could be unceasingly and assuredly 
favorable. But how much more so, when, as we all 
have reason to know, there is not to any one a mo- 
ment assured, nor a single contingency of any earthly 
good that can be held or claimed as certain. In 
such a world, it is not strange that thinking men are 
ever perplexed, and utterly at a loss to answer the 
question—what is our life; and why are its con- 
ditions here so utterly lacking in all the qualities of 
certitude in the process or finality in the end of 
development ? 


4 


50 LEE WITINE SSAO TMI Le Gi ROL, 


There is, there can be, no answer in any scheme of 
human philosophy; the only possible explanation is 
found in the revelation of a judgment to come. 
Admit that the life of earth is probationary, and in- 
tended by the Creator to be only probationary, its 
characteristics clearly could not be final. Every- 
thing must have relation to something beyond, and 
so must be apparently incomplete, and, in the in- 
completeness, unsatisfactory here. We do not say 
that this is, either to our speculative reason or our im- 
patient fancies, a sufficient and satisfactory explana- 
tion. There is, unquestionably, much on every hand 
that is perplexing still; but what we do say is, that 
this is ¢he only explanation, and that in it we have 
the only assurance of an end and purpose of life that 
make it worth living. 

Grasp it clearly and strongly, hold fast to it and 
live on it, and you will be sure, at least, of a stead- 
Fast and consistent motive in life. There is something 
to live for which is worth attaining, and which, when 
attained, will be a possession assured. There need 
be no disparagement of achievements which are hon- 
orable or attainments which are desirable in this 
world. Let all their worth be conceded, and all the 
labor and struggle that men are willing to give for 
their attainment be acknowledged as legitimate and 
even praiseworthy. Still, the undeniable fact remains, 
that they are all, without exception, temporary and 
perishable in their nature, and altogether uncertain 
and unassured in their tenure. At best, then, they 
cannot be legitimately final for beings, such as we 
are, who have an instinctive sense of immortality ; 


LO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 51 


they must be subordinated to some purpose beyond, 
which is in its scope eternal. 

This is precisely the truth in the revelation of the 
judgment to come. That judgment, as revealed, is 
essentially the setting of the seal of eternal right- 
eousness on all the issues of this mortal life. We 
are too apt to think of it, from our traditionary read- 
ing of the mere phraseology of certain texts, as a 
formal tribunal, to be held within a definite period 
for the pronouncement of sentences, either of ac- 
quittal unto everlasting bliss or of condemnation 
unto eternal woe, upon every one of all the world’s 
living souls. But, while it is true that the phrase- 
ology of Scripture presents the picture of such a 
tribunal, it should be remembered that pictures, 
which are images of things that we have seen, must 
needs be drawn to give us any conception of a state 
that we have not seen; and yet, that these images 
are only imperfect and inadequate illustrations. The 
“Day of Judgment,’ we know, cannot be a day as 
we now reckon in the measurement of time by the 
diurnal revolution of the earth, for there is to be 
“time no longer” there. Rather, it should be con- 
cluded to be a dispensation, and that of eternal 
duration; a dispensation fitly called the Day of 
Judgment, because then the judgment of righteous- 
ness alone will determine every one’s allotment and 
condition; just as the whole period of our present 
life is fitly called “the day of probation,” because it 
is our time of trial, or, “ the day of grace,” because 
it is the time while the long-suffering mercy of God 
in Christ Jesus is bearing with us. But, however 


'52 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


imperfectly grasped by our conceptions, the essential 
fact is, that in that dispensation perfect righteous- 
ness will be universally revealed and eternally mani- 
fested. No more prevalence and power of wrongs, 
no more hiding and dissembling of iniquities, no 
more crafty wiles or successful over-reaches of dis- 
honesty, no more triumphing or exaltation of the 
wicked, no more oppression or humiliation of the 
righteous, no more possibility of confounding right 
with wrong, nor even of misunderstanding a single 
shade of one for the other; but, everywhere and for 
all, perfect equity and the clear light of truth, and, 
in that truth and by that equity, the allotment of 
every one according as his earthly life shall have 
been. 

Brethren, is it not worth while to live for suchan . 
end? Is it not worth while to fix our eye steadily 
upon it and direct all our steps in the short path of 
this mortal life so that they may carry us steadily 
onward, and that with an evermore sure and direct 
tread toward its blessedness? Should we not 
do this with great thankfulness for the light which 
~ beams from such a revelation even upon our dark- 
ness here in this world? In this light, we may well 
take as our rule the precept of the Apostle in our 
text, and be concerned to “ judge nothing before the 
time,’ because we have a certain assurance that the 
Lord will come, and that, when He cometh, He 
‘both will bring to light the hidden things of dark- 
ness, and will make manifest the councils of ‘all’ 
hearts, and then shall every man have praise of 
God.” We need not allow ourselves to be troubled 


LOVCHRISTIAN: FALL I, ate. 


with the perplexing problems of evil; the judgment 
either of men or of things is not our responsibility ; 
itis all in the province of an infinitely higher and 
wiser and juster tribunal; it will all be determined 
righteously, with perfect truth and justice, infallibly 
and eternally. Wait then; wait patiently; wait 
trustfully. The judgment is determined; all will 
be made clear; the Lord alone will reign in that — 
day, and every eye shall see Him and perceive that 
He is a God of truth and without iniquity, that 
justice and equity are the eternal habitation of His 
throne, and mercy and truth shall go, always and 
everywhere, before His face. 


54 LHE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


Vik 


THE HISTORICAL VERITY OF THE 
INCARNATION. 


Christmas. 


And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us.— 
I John, iv, 16, 


THE first effect of the service to-day should be to 
bring us all to consider anew with ourselves if we 
do, in very truth, believe in the incarnation and 
human birth of the Son of Almighty God. 

The birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem of Judea, 
eighteen centuries ago, is indeed an unquestionable 
fact of history. We say an unquestionable fact, be- 
cause it is attested by all the settled requirements of 
historical credibility, and the truth of it cannot be 
impeached on any ground that would not involve 
the undermining of all historical faith. In the old 
controversial assaults of infidelity, the veritableness 
of this fact, and, with it, the real existence of sucha 
person as Jesus Christ, has, indeed, been sometimes 
taken asa point of attack; but never with any degree 
of success, not even in the judgment of infidelity 
itself. For, in the great net-work of human history, 
in which, complicated and many colored as it is, not 
one thread has been, or can be, admitted that was 
not made of the real stuff—the facts and influences 
that constitute the actual elements of human life, 
the person and work of Jesus Christ fill too large a 
space and hold it by too many, too important, too 


EOVCHKSLaH WY ATTA, 55 


complicated and far-reaching strands, to be displaced 
without an entire destruction of its symmetry and 
consistency. 

There is, therefore, no difficulty in believing the 
fact which this day commemorates, in relation merely 
to the birth and real existence of Jesus Christ, as a 
fact of veritable history. 

Nor is there any considerable difficulty in believ- 
ing that His birth was that of a very extraordinary 
personage. Indeed, the admission of the first fact 
leads almost necessarily to the recognition of this as 
the second. The eye of reverent faith sees the birth 
of Jesus Christ to be the central point—the very fo- 
cus—of all human history, and Himself the very vital 
head of the human race; but, even on ground which 
is far below the apprehension of such faith, the life 
and character of Jesus Christ stand out with a pre- 
eminence that is incomparably superior to any other 
in the whole family of mankind. ‘“ Even a scepti- 
cal historian finds in Him the explanation of all his- 
tory ; a democratic leader tells a nation crushed by 
long oppression that He was the best representative 
and truest child of the people ; a victorious emperor, 
the last great man of secular history, contrasting his 
own utter evanescence with Christ’s eternal rule, 
declares that he understands and recognizes man, 
and that Jesus Christ was not a man; a prophet of 
anarchy and naturalism, in the mid confession of his 
faith, suddenly bursts into eloquent admiration, and, 
with a hand as firm as that of a martyr, writes that, 
‘if the life and death of Socrates are those of a 
sage, the life and death of Jesus Christ are those 


56 THE WITNESS ORETHEGCH URCE: 


of a God.’” We need, therefore, but recognize the 
truth of history and give due heed to its universally 
accepted principles of credible evidence, when we 
give our assent so far to the faith of Christendom as 
to acknowledge that He, whose birth the Church 
this day commemorates, was not only a real person- 
age, but the very greatest ofall personages in human 
history ; so incomparably the greatest, in both His 
own excellence and the extent of His influence, that 
no other of all the world’s great men can for a mo- 
ment be allowed to stand in any scale of competi- 
tion or comparison with Him. 

May we not, in assenting simply to historical 
credibility, go further—and very much further— 
even than this? May we not—if we follow here to 
their legitimate conclusion the principles of histori- 
cal verity, must we not believe, in commemorating 
the birth of Jesus Christ, that we are commemorat- 
ing, not only the birth of the greatest human per- 
sonage, but even, and that in some very true and 
peculiar sense; the birth of the Son of Gocr e@as 
we accept the historical records of Christ’s life as in 
any degree genuine, without admitting that He 
asserted for Himself the Divine Sonship, specially 
and exclusively, in His own person; and that so 
originally and potentially, that through covenanted 
union with Him, all men might be brought into the 
filial relationship toward God? So clear is this, that 
in a workof remarkable acuteness, written avowedly 
for the purpose of getting at those “conclusions 
about Christ, not which church doctors or even 
Apostles have sealed with their authority, but which 


TO. CHRISTIAN FAITH. 57 


the facts themselves, critically weighed, appear to 
warrant,” the writer found himself compelled to ad- 
mit the “unbounded personal pretensions which 
Christ advanced,” and to put the admission in these 
strong terms: “It is common in human history to 
meet with those who claim some superiority over 
their fellows. Men assert a pre-eminence over their 
fellow citizens or fellow countrymen, and become 
rulers of those who at first were their equals, but 
they dream of nothing greater than some partial 
control over the actions of others for the short space 
of a lifetime. Few, indeed, are those to whom it is 
given to influence future ages. Yet some men have 
appeared who have been as leversto uplift the earth 
and roll it in another course. Homer by creating lit- 
erature, Socrates by science, Czesar by carrying civil- 
ization inland from the shores of the Mediterranean, 
Newton by starting science upon a career of steady 
progress, may be said to have attained this eminence. 
But these men gave a single impact, like that which is 
conceived to have first set the planets in motion; 
Christ claims to be a perpetual attractive power, like 
the sun which determined their orbit. They con- 
tributed to men some discovery and passed away ; 
Christ’s discovery is Himself. To humanity struggling 
with its passion and its destiny He says, ‘ Cling to 
Me, cling ever close to Me.’ If we believe St. John 
He represented Himself as the Light of the world, as 
the Shepherd of the souls of men, as the way to im- 
mortality, as the Vine, or Lifetree, of humanity. 
And if we refuse to believe that He used these 
words, we cannot deny, without rejecting all the 


58 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


evidence before us, that He used words which have 
substantially the same meaning. Wecannot deny 
that He commanded men to leave everything and 
attach themselves to Him; that He declared Him- 
self King, Master, and Judge of men; that He 
promised to give rest to all the weary and heavy 
laden; that He instructed His followers to hope for 
life from feeding on His body and blood.” * 

Strong as this statement of Christ’s personal pre- 
tensions is, it is not too strong. For, while it is true 
that His character as portrayed in the Gospel narra- 
tives is universally accepted as the very type of 
genuine humility, it is, at the same time, true that 
there is hardly one of His recorded discourses in 
which such self-assertions as would be justly ac- 
counted monstrously assumptive in the mouth of 
any other person do not occur. These assertions 
as made by Him cannot by any possibility be mis- 
taken for the ebullitions of self-conceit. They are 
unmistakably the natural expression of true self- 
knowledge. And yet He seems to find it necessary 
almost to exhaust the capacity of human speech to 
find terms adequate to express His self-sufficiency. 
Sometimes He employs metaphoric and frequently 
plain unmetaphorical assertion; but, whether the 
one or the other, it is without hesitation, without 
qualification, and without the least apparent thought 
of a possibility that His language could go beyond 
the simple truth in declaring the fulness of His 
ability or the perfection of His virtue. He speaks 
of Himself as ‘‘the Living Bread that came down 


* Ecce Homo, pp. 190, 191. 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 59 


from Heaven,” to the end that believers in Him 
might feed on Him and thus have eternal life. He 
points to a living water of the Spirit, which He can 
give and which will quench the thirst of souls that 
drink it. All who came before Him, He character- 
izes as having been, by comparison with Himself, the 
“thieves and robbers” of mankind. He is Himself 
the one “ Good Shepherd” of the souls of men; He 
knows and is known of His true sheep. Not only is 
He the shepherd, He is the very “ Door” of the sheep- 
fold; to enter through Him is to be safe. He is the 
Vine, the Life-tree of regenerate humanity. All that 
is fruitful and lovely in the human family must branch 
forth from Him; all spiritual life must wither and die 
if it be severed from His. He stands consciously 
between earth and Heaven. He claims to be the 
one means of a real approach to the invisible God; 
no soul of man can come to the Father but through 
Him. He promises that all prayer shall be an- 
swered, if only it be offered in His name; He even 
promises to be Himself the one who will hear and 
effectively answer such prayer: “If ye ask any- 
thing in my name, J w7// do zt.” He contrasts Him- 
self with a group of His countrymen, by these terms: 
‘Ye are from beneath, I am from above: Ye are 
of this world, I am not of this world.” He antici- 
pates His death and foretells its consequences: “I, 
if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men 
unto myself.” He claims to be the Lord of the 
realm of death; He will himself wake the sleeping 
dead; all that are in the graves shall hear His voice; 
He will raise even Himself from the dead. He pro- 


60 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


claims: “I am the Resurrection, and the Life.” He 
bids men trust in Him as they trust in God, to make 
Him the object of faith, just as they believe in God, 
to honor Him as they honor the Father; to love 
Him is a certain mark of the children of God. It is 
not possible, He rules, to hate Him without, at the 
same time, hating God: “ He that hateth me, hateth 
my Father also.” The proof of a true love to Him 
lies in precisely that which proves love to God,— 
the doing of His bidding: “ If ye love me, keep my 
commandments.’’* 

Since, in the life of Jesus, such claims as these, 
with many others of like import, are unquestionably 
recorded, and since all subsequent history has borne 
continuous and constantly accumulating testimony 
to the power of His name in maintaining His ac- 
knowledged right to such claims, there is surely war- 
rant for the conclusion that historical credence con- 
curs, most decidedly, with Christian faith in esteem- 
ing Jesus Christ not only as the one supremely ex- 
cellent above all the sons of men, but also as in some 
special and unique sense, the incarnate Son of Al- 
mighty God. 

But, my brethren, when we are brought thus far, 
even by an honest acceptance of historical fact, can we 
be true to this leading unless our hearts within us are 
uplifted with fervent impulses for a far higher range ? 

‘“‘In some special and unique sense, the incarnate 
son of Almighty God,” what does that mean? 

It means that the Almighty and Everlasting Be- 
ing, who is the Author and Sustainer of the universe, 


* See Liddon’s Bamp. Lect. pp. 170-2. 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 61 


in Whom we and all creatures live and move, for com- 
munion with Whom our spiritual nature is always in- 
stinctively craving, but Whose habitation is far above, 
out of our sight,—that He, the Lord God Almighty, 
hath responded to this craving by a most merciful 
revelation of Himself in the world of our humanity ; 
that He hath put His recognizing and approving seal 
upon our feeling after affinity with Him; that even 
here in our earthly estate and amid its lowly condi- 
tions, He hath not left Himself without witness to 
assure us that He is in very truth our Father and 
that we are His children. More than this. On the 
simple historical credibility of the New Testament 
Scriptures, it means that special exigencies in our 
earthly condition were mercifully recognized by Him 
as calling for special interposition; that because s7z 
had come into our life, and through sin death with 
all its woes, He had graciously recognized the need 
of a new creation, and in the person of His-only be- 
gotten Son submitted Himself to the lowliest limita- 
tions of our human nature, that He might restore us 
to the fullest possible participation in His life, even 
in that which is heavenly and eternal. 

This is what we have to recognize as veritable his- 
torical fact in our commemorative service to-day. 
And with such recognition what will surely follow if 
we be true to our apprehensions of historical fact? 
Very clearly we have here an unquestionable histor- 
ical authentication of our religious instincts and as- 
pirations. The real existence and operation of these 
is matter of every one’s personal experience. We 
have them as naturally as we have physical senses 


62 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


and appetites. Like the latter, they are constantly 
looking for and feeling after something outside of 
themselves for their satisfaction. They were made 
for this satisfaction, and cannot rest till they find it. 
Here, then, even in the revelation of Jesus Christ, 
the only begotten Son of Almighty God, incarnate, 
these cravings and aspirations are historically authen- 
ticated, and religious faith becomes, not merely a 
devout outreaching of the imagination, but an as- 
surance of fact. We feel after God, if haply we may 
find Him, and here He revealeth Himself to us, and 
maketh Himself known. We feel that we are not 
only, like all other living things, His creatures, but 
also, in some higher and more special sense, His 
children; and here He assures us that He is very 
truly and very lovingly our Father. We feel that 
we are some how out of our proper place in this world, 
that we are not what we might be, what we ought 
to be or desire to be; and here is the revelation of 
the cause and the cure of this mal-adjustment. Here 
God “ commendeth His love to us, in that while we 
were yet sinners,” “ He spared not His own Son, but 
delivered Him up for us all, that we, through Him, 
might be delivered from the bondage of corruption 
into the glorious liberty” and the everlasting life 
“of the children of God.” 

Therefore, dear brethren, we may well say with 
the Apostle, and that most emphatically and most 
thankfully, to-day: ““We have known and believed 
the love that God hath to us.” And in this knowl- 
edge and belief is there not all-sufficient reason for 
this joyful commemoration and for all its appropri- 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 63 


ate tokens and accompaniments? Yes, this is surely 
beyond question. It only remains that we be true 
to this knowledge and belief. If God so loved us, 
we ought to love Him with a pure heart fervently, 
and, through the love of Him, also to love one 
another. With this love our hearts should all be 
glowing brightly to-day. 


*“Lovest thou Me? I hear my Saviour say. 
Would that my heart had power to answer, Yea, 
Thou knowest all things, Lord, in heaven above, 
And earth beneath ; Thou knowest that I love. 
But ’tis not so; in word, in deed, in thought, 
I do not, cannot, love Thee as I ought : 
Thy love must give that power, Thy love alone ; 
There’s nothing worthy of Thee but Thine own ; 
Lord, with the love wherewith Thou lovest me, 
Reflected on myself, I would love Thee.” 


64 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


Wilde 


DHE AVA GA do Wit BTV 0 Ue he 
INCARNATION. 


Christmas. 


For verily, He took not on Him the nature of angels, but He 
took on Him the seed of Abraham.—/edrews, xt. 16. 


TuHE truth which is here declared is emphasized 
for us at this season, that our divine Saviour in His 
incarnation submitted Himself to all the vital con- 
ditions of our human nature. As He came down 
from Heaven to save us, He passed by all the ranks 
of the angelic hosts, and took on Him the nature of 
the race which was to be redeemed. Being from 
eternity the Son of God, He became as truly the 
Son of Man; and, together with the divine nature 
which was His eternally and essentially, He united 
in His personal being and consciousness the nature 
which belongs to our human sphere in the creation. 

Now, to realize this truth we must consider some- 
what more precisely than we are commonly apt to 
do what is meant by our human nature. 

In a general way we are all conscious, of course, 
that our human life and being has in it certain pecu- 
liarities which belong to it as essentially its own. 
We know that every species of living beings has life 
after its kind, and that our life as human beings is 
of a kind which differs essentially from that of angels 
above or of the many orders of the brute creation 
below us. If we were asked to say why our life is 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 65 


of this peculiar kind, we would say at once, because 
we are human in nature, which seems to be the same 
thing as simply saying that we are born so ; but it is 
really more. It means that there is in our race, as 
in every other species of creature, a certain vital 
principle which exists only in this race, but which 
in it is universally predominant, so that the life and 
being of every member thereof is determined by it ; 
and yet that no other order of creatures in the uni- 
verse can have sucha kind of life or exist in such a 
kind of being. This underlying and determining 
principle is called our za¢ure ; but what it is, whether 
it be substance or pure force, whether, indeed, it be 
anything but the creative law of life, no philosophy 
is keen enough to tell. But the fact which we do 
know is, that it makes us human beings and nothing 
else. And in this fact there are certainly involved 
two other facts, viz., that all human beings are one 
with us in this nature, and that no other kind of 
beings, without participation in this nature, can have 
part in our oneness of life. 

Let us consider these facts. 

We, who are human beings, having a common nat- 
ure, have therein a common life, and are in a very 
true sense allone. It may seem fanciful, but it is 
really true to say that the race is as truly one as any 
individual person is one. For what makes the one- 
ness of a person? Is it not the oneness of his life 
and being? There are belonging to him many 
members, and these members have not all the same 
office. There are differences of functions and of ad- 
ministrations in him; but one life principle deter- 

2 


66 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


mines them all, and makes him in whom they are 
operative one person. So, the great human race has 
many individual members, and these members have 
their various functions, operative on an incompa- 
rably wider scale and differing from each other in 
their ways and works by a more incalculably multi- 
plied diversity of variations, but yet the principle of 
being is one; and so the race is really, and that in 
the truest possible sense, one. 

Would that we could realize this more than we 
do. It is the needful counteractive to the selfishness - 
which is rooted in our sense of individuality. That 
is the most obvious fact of our being that we are, 
each one, himself, with his own consciousness, will, 
desires, pursuits, and destiny. Therefore, the nat- 
ural inclination is for every one to live and care for 
himself as if he were really alone and his life the 
only thing of interest or importance in the universe. 
But the real truth, which he forgets, is that while he 
is indeed an individual, he is not complete in him- 
self, but is only an individual #zesber—a member of a 
body—that this body is the real unzt ; and that there 
are common interests and common responsibilities 
which extend throughout the whole body, and are 
included in the heritage of every member in its 
common life. It would be well for us to remember 
that this heritage of a common nature makes us all 
very much like each other, notwithstanding all the 
apparent differences. 

The greatest difference of all is that which sepa- 
rates the good from the bad; for this isa difference 
which goes deeper than any circumstantial posses- 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 67 


sion or quality, and touches that with which every 
person is most absolutely identified, viz., his charac- 
ter. And yet, even here, there is more of common 
likeness than most of us imagine or may be willing 
to acknowledge. It is not meant, of course, to say 
that goodness and badness, righteousness and wick- 
edness, are alike; but that the likeness is in the 
common nature of men whose reputation is, on the 
whole, that of either one or the other. Take an ex- 
treme case, that of a man who has from his very 
infancy been steadily growing in all the virtues of 
grace, and, on the other hand, that of one who has 
repeatedly and deeply fallen into gross sin and been 
finally brought to repentance; these two, different 
as they certainly are in both their courses of life 
and their characters, will yet be found to be very 
much like each other in their view of themselves 
and in their feelings upon the temptations through 
which they have severally passed. This is most 
strikingly instanced when men whose reputation has 
been very marked for holiness of life have left be- 
hind them a daily record of their spiritual experi- 
ence. In such cases there are sure to be found such 
strong and repeated self-accusations, such confessions 
of guiltiness and such expressions of penitent regret 
in the consciousness of their own defilement by it, 
that even bad men can say, “ This is just our case,” 
and argue from it that there is no difference between 
bad and good. ‘And I suppose,” says one* of re- 
markable acuteness in analyzing human character, 
“T suppose it cannot be denied, concerning all of us, 


* J. H. Newman, Paroch. Serm., vol. ii. p. 277. 


68 THE WITNESS OM: THE, CHURCH 


that we are generally surprised to hear the strong 
language which good men use of themselves, as if 
such confessions show them to be more like our- 
selves, and much less holy than we had fancied 
them to be. And onthe other hand, I suppose any 
man of tolerably correct life, whatever his positive 
advancement in grace, will seldom read accounts of 
notoriously bad men, in which their ways and feel- 
ings are described, without being shocked to find 
that these more or less cast ameaning upon his own 
heart, and bring out into light and color lines and 
shapes of thought within him, which, till then, were 
almost invisible. Now,this does not show that bad 
and good men are on a level, but it shows this, that 
they are of the same nature. It shows that the one 
has within him in tendency, what the other has 
brought out into actual existence, so that the good 
has nothing to boast over the bad, and while what 
is good in him is from God’s grace, there is an abun- 
dance left which marks him as being beyond all 
doubt of one blood with those sons of Adam who 
are still far from Christ, their Redeemer.” 

This truth, then, of the oneness of our human 
nature, is no merely speculative truth; it is very 
practical. And the realization and remembrance of 
it would help us all to get out of the slough of sel- 
fishness, to rid us of self-conceit, and to make us 
humble as well as considerate in bearing with each 
other’s frailties and faults, and ready with cheerful 
alacrity and patient continuance to bear, as far as 
we may, each other’s burdens. 

But, in the Christian faith and life it has, as we 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 69 


have already intimated, a far higher consequence. 
The text tells us that Christ, the Son of God, took 
on Him our nature. Inthe light of this truth, then, 
it is clear that He became verily one with us. ‘There 
is not a feeling, not a passion, not a wish, not an in- 
firmity which we have, which did not belong to that 
manhood which He assumed, except only such as is 
of the nature of sin. There is not a trial or tempta- 
tion which befalls us, but was, in kind at least, pre- 
sented before Him, except that He had no evil 
within Him sympathizing with that which came to 
Him from without.” So that we can understand 
and realize the truth, of which we have the explicit 
assurance of the inspired Word, that “ We have not 
a high priest which cannot be touched with the feel- 
ing of our infirmities, but was in all points tempted 
like as we are, yet without sin;” and that, “in that 
He himself hath suffered, being tempted, He is 
able to succor them that are tempted.” 

Could we, possibly, have the comfort of this 
assurance, or, indeed, could it be possible for us to 
trust in the Son of God as our Saviour, or, so far as 
we can apprehend the laws of life, can we see the 
possibility of His being our Saviour except by thus 
becoming one with us through the incarnate assump- 
tion of our nature? 

I do not see how it could be possible. The oneness 
of life which belongs to any nature, belongs to that 
nature exclusively ; so that, without participation in 
the nature, it is not possible for any other kind of 
being to participate in the life. We human beings 
can sympathize with each other fully in every pos- 


70 RHE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


sible depth of our nature, because we have all the 
same nature; but we cannot sympathize, in any such 
sense, with any other kind of creature. It is only so 
far as the qualities of nature touch and coincide that 
we can really sympathize at all. We can, in a very 
true sense, save each other; that is, we can save each 
other in the sense which includes all that we are per- 
sonally. But, if there could be anything correspond- 
ing to Adam’s fall in the inner life of any of the 
orders of creatures which are below us, we could not 
wn any such sense save them, because, plainly, the 
essential difference between their nature and ours 
would incapacitate us from real sympathy with their 
life, and it would equally incapacitate them from - 
understanding or receiving our help even if it should 
be proffered them. There is profound mystery in 
all this, but it is clearly true. And though it re- 
quires thought, it is well for us to make an effort to 
think it out, for the truth is full of light and comfort 
for our faith in the mystery of our redemption. We 
are overwhelmed by the revelation of the Incarnation 
of the Son of God. Our faith is dazed in trying to 
accept the possibility of so infinite a condescension,— 
and it must ever be a mystery of grace beyond our 
comprehension—but here we can see that, without 
a violation of the fundamental laws of life, there 
must have been an incarnation, if there was to be a 
real salvation. The Son of God must become in 
very truth the Son of Man, if life for man was to be 
had and assured through Him. 

Therefore, there is unspeakable comfort for us, 
there is ground for infinite thankfulness in the 


O° GHRISTIAN FATIA, 71 


assurance which we have that Christ, our divine and 
adorable Saviour, “took not on Him the nature of 
angels, but He took on Him the seed of Abraham.” 
For in this we have the assurance, all sufficient for 
our most trustful faith, that “He is able to save 
to the uttermost them that come unto God by 
Him ;” that He can present himself to them as 
one with them, and equally present them before 
the Father as one in Him. 

And oh, dear brethren, with our most thankful 
acceptance of this great truth of the Gospel of 
Christ, this truth which makes it indeed the Gospel, 
good news, glad tidings of salvation to us, let us not 
fail to lay hold of the truth which is its equally great 
counterpart, that it is ours to be in very reality par- 
takers of the Divine Nature. If Christ, the Son of 
God, became one with us, His salvation for us is to 
be effected by our being made one with Him as God. 
And here, again, our own reason can see no other 
possible way. There must be oneness of nature if 
there is to be oneness of life. If our eternal life is 
to be that of heaven, whose very atmosphere is the 
breath of God, it must needs be that there must pass 
upon us a divine regeneration, so that we may be 
capacitated to receive God as dwelling in us, and to 
have in our consciousness the veritable assurance 
that our life is in Him. 

This may bea partial explanation to us of the econ- 
omy of sacramental grace. The Church isdeclared to 
be the body of Christ, and all Christians are asserted 
to be members together of the one Body in Him. It 
is here, then, that the life of our regenerate nature 


72 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


must find both its vital principle and its congenial 
nutriment. Here, in prayers and sacraments, 
we commune with God, and “ grow up in Him from 
whom, the whole body, fitly framed and knit to- 
gether and compacted by that which every yee 
supplieth, increaseth with the increase of God.” 

In the present life it is, of course, futile for us 
to attempt to understand why, or how it is that 
our spiritual being is sustained and nurtured in 
this way; but it is equally futile to attempt to 
understand why or how it is that our natural life 
has its sustaining nutriment in our daily food. In 
both relations our part is, simply, to conform 
to what is clearly the divine ordinance; and then 
we are sure to grow, though we know not how, 
and in this growth to attain unto the stature of men. 
Oh! blessed consummation of our growth in the di- 
vine life, which is made possible, by the grace of 
God, for every one of us to attain “to the stature 
of a man in Christ Jesus;” to be “made complete” 
in Him! “It doth not yet appear what we shall 
be; but we know, that when He shall appear, we 
shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” 


TO: CHRISTIAN FAITH. 73 


VIII. 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 


Epiphany. 


I shall see Him, but not now: I shall behold Him, but not nigh: 
there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of 
Israel.—Numbers, xxiv. 17. 


WHATEVER be the explanation of the apparent in- 
consistencies in the character and functions of Ba- 
laam,—whether it be the supposition that, as one, 
and perhaps the last, of the favored seers under the 
patriarchal dispensation in that Eastern region of 
the Gentiles, he had possessed the gift of prophecy 
and been vouchsafed the knowledge of the Most 
High ; or, that now, by an extraordinary miraculous 
interposition, the tokens of the diviner were frus- 
trated and he was constrained to speak for God,— 
there can be no doubt of the genuineness and con- 
sequent truthfulness of this prophecy. For, it is 
established by proof of Holy Writ as strong, as ex- 
plicit, and of precisely the same character, as that by 
which all other prophecies are established. | 

As such, then, let us now listen to it and consider 
its import. ‘I shall see Him, but not now: I shall 
behold Him, but not nigh.” To whom must this 
predictive anticipation have been looking? And 
then, what is meant by the additional, and seeming- 
ly figurative, prediction: “There shall come a 
Star out of Jacob and a Sceptre shall rise out of 
Israel.” 


74 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


Possibly, as some suppose, there may have been 
a primary reference here to David; and the predic- 
tion may have found a partial fulfilment in his vic- 
tories over the idolatrous tribes of Canaan and the. 
consequent extension of his Empire over the whole 
of that land. But this cannot have been all. The 
solemn preface, “Balaam the Son of Beor hath 
said, and the man whose eyes are open hath said: he 
nath said which heard the words of God, and knew 
the knowledge of the Most High, which saw the vis- 
ions of the Almighty, falling into a trance, but hav- 
ing his eyes open ’—this prepares us for a prophecy 
of weightier import than the reign or the conquest 
of any mere earthly king; and the distinct specifica- 
tion of the latter days, as the time in which the 
prophecy was to be fulfilled, requires that our view be 
carried on far beyond the time of David’s reign. 
And then the prediction: “I shall see Az, but not 
now: I shall behold Az, but not nigh.” How 
emphatic that HIM. Surely, it points to one greater 
than David; one who should stand alone, distinct 
from, and far above, all the sons of men; one who 
should be, not only the founder of a dynasty, but 
the very Head of arace. “I shall see Him, but not 
now: 1 shall behold Him, but not nigh :” this cannot 
refer to one of that dispensation, but of another and 
that far distant, even the last—the dispensation of 
the latter days. And we need not, we cannot, doubt 
that the person to whom it did have reference, and 
in whom it finds its true fulfilment, was He, the tes- 
timony of Whom was through all the elder dispensa- 
tion ever to be recognized as the spirit of prophecy ; 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. Bs 


even Jesus, the Messiah for whom Israel waited, and 
in whom all the ends of the earth are to find salva- 
tion. , 

Is it not likely that such a prophecy, by a seer so 
eminent in the East as Balaam unquestionably was, 
would have been remembered and treasured up with 
traditionary veneration, especially by those who 
kept the keys of traditional knowledge in that East- 
ern region? Is it not likely that the birth of Hz 
whom Balaam had thus in the spirit of prophecy 
foretold, should, for ages, have been expected, and 
the star, which was to rise out of Jacob, eagerly 
looked for? And then, at last, after many waiting 
centuries, when a mysterious star was seen, is it 
strange that these Magi of the East,—spiritual succes- 
sors, as they were, of Balaam,—should have remem- 
bered his prophecy, and, with exulting yet anxious 
hearts, journeyed to the land of promise to render 
their homage to the long-expected Prince? 

With this view of the prophecy and its fulfilment, 
it has a special interest for us and a special claim 
upon our consideration now. It is a prophecy of 
Christ, spoken near two thousand years before His 
birth, by one who was of Gentile race; and when 
He came, the evidence of its fulfilment was granted 
to those who were likewise Gentiles, born and living 
beyond the pale of the elect nation. Here, then, is 
one, and that not the least interesting, of the evi- 
dences that Christ was the object of desire for many 
long ages, not only in Jewry, but in all nations ; that, 
as the inspired Apostle declares, “the whole cre- 
ation groaned and travailed in pain together, and 


76 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


the earnest expectation of the creature waited”’ for 
the manifestation of the Son of God. “I shall see 
Him, but not now.”” Oh, what blissful anticipation, 
what deep yearning, what unutterable longing is 
implied in that prophetic declaration! ‘I shall see 
Him.” How many prophets and kings desired to 
see Him; how many, and for how many long years, 
watched for that mystic star—the lamp that God 
had promised to light—to lead the footsteps of the 
nations to the birth-place of His Son! And when, 
at last, that star shone out, what must have been the 
feelings of those Eastern watchers whose eyes were 
eladdened by its rays? We have the record of their 
conduct. They rose up at once, as did the shepherds 
of Judea, who saw, perhaps, the same light, and ex- 
claimed: “ Let us now go even unto Bethlehem ;” let 
us find Him, the long expected One, who is born at 
last, the King of the Jews. Behold, His star riseth 
out of Jacob; surely His sceptre is already swaying 
over Israel! 

And now, my brethren, as we turn back and medi- 
tate on this wonderful chapter in the divine history, 
there seems to issue from it a gleam of light which 
serves to relieve one phase of perplexity which is 
apt to cloud our faith in the scheme of salvation as 
unfolded in the Holy Scriptures. It is an old dif- 
ficulty, and, in one relation, was felt even by St. 
Paul, as we have it discussed in the Epistle to the 
Romans, and read in part as one of our Lessons to- 
day, viz.: the apparent injustice and partiality of the 
election of grace, selecting one portion of the human 
family, and that a very small portion, an insignifi- 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 77 


cant nation, to be the sole depository of the divine 
revelations and the sole recipient of the divinely 
ordained provisions and means of grace ; while all 
the rest of the world were left to gropeon in the 
darkness and perplexity of heathenism. And then, 
as an issue of this seemingly unjust discrimination in 
the first place, the subsequent rejection of the elect 
nation and the substitution of others for special 
favor, without lifting very extensively the veil of 
spiritual darkness, which has now for two thousand 
years since the birth of the Redeemer hung over the 
face of by far the greater part of the nations of 
mankind! Certainly, there are very serious diff- 
culties suggested here. But, as the old Jews were 
plainly told by the Apostles that they had originated 
the perplexity chiefly by their narrow and selfish 
interpretation of the divine economy, so it has 
been, and is now, with us modern Christians. We, 
by our narrow conceptions of the divine revelations 
and the divine guidance, have used our special 
privileges of grace in the Christian revelation to 
foster a proud self-complacency; and have been will- 
ing to suppose that all the rest of mankind were 
utterly uncared for by the great Father of all. It is 
not possible for us, indeed, to estimate too highly, 
or even adequately, our advantages as recipients of 
the special revelations which are recorded in inspired 
Scriptures and brought to us by the ministrations of 
a divinely constituted church; but it is nevertheless 
true, and that on the authority of the Bible itself, 
that a// knowledge of religion is from God, and that 
He hath never left any nation without witness of 


78 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


Him; nowhere, and at no time, neglected to speak 
to the erring children of fallen man or by some 
beacon lights, more or less clear, to show them the 
path of righteousness unto everlasting life. There 
is a sense in which it is undoubtedly true that “there 
is something divinely revealed in every religion all 
over the earth, overloaded as it may be, and at times 
even stifled by the impieties which the corrupt will 
and understanding of man have incorporated with 
it.” In proof of this it has been well pointed out 
that in all such religions these fundamental doctrines 
are found, viz.: “Of the power and presence of an 
invisible God, of His moral law and governance, of 
the obligation of duty, and the certainty of a just 
judgment, and of reward and punishment, as event- 
ually dispensed to individuals.” Since we do find 
a recognition of these great truths in all historical 
religions, there would seem to be sufficient warrant 
for the conclusion that “revelation, properly speak- 
ing, is an universal, not a local gift.” And if that be 
true, it follows that the real “ distinction between 
the state of Israelites formerly and Christians now 
and that of the heathen is,” not that while we are 
infallibly illuminated in the way of eternal life, they 
are left in absolute darkness beyond the possibility of 
ever attaining to it, but rather, “ that the Church of 
God,” within the pale of which it is our inestimable 
privilege to have our lot, has, and “ever has hag, 
and the rest of mankind never have had, authori- 
tative documents of truth, and appointed channels 
of communication with Him.” The word and the 
sacrament are the special privileges and distinguish- 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 79 


ing characteristics of the elect people of God; ‘“ but 
all men have had more or less the guidance of tra- 
dition, in addition to those internal notions of right 
and wrong which the Spirit has put into the heart 
of each individual.”* 

This is no new theory, no modification of Christian 
exclusiveness to meet the requirements of modern 
infidelity. For, as long ago as the second century, 
it was thus written by so eminent a Christian Father 
as Clement of Alexandria: “God is the cause of 
all good things; but of some primarily, as of the 
Old and the New Testament; and of others by con- 
sequence, as philosophy. Perchance, too, philosophy 
was given to the Greeks directly and primarily, till 
the Lord should call the Greeks. For this was a 
schoolmaster to bring the Hellenic mind, as the law 
the Hebrews, to Christ. Philosophy, therefore, was 
a preparation, paving the way for him who is per- 
fected in Christ.” + And again: “ It is He who gave 
philosophy to the Greeks by means of the inferior 
angels. For by an ancient and divine order the 
angels are distributed among the nations. * A on 
For He is the Saviour, not of some, and of others 
not; but in proportion to the adaptation possessed 
by each, He has dispensed His beneficence both to 
Greeks and barbarians, even to those of them that 
were predestinated, and in due time called the faith- 
ful and elect. * * * Wherefore, also, the Lord, 

rawing the Commandments, both the first which 
He gave and the second, from one fount, neither 


* Newman’s Arians of the 4th Century, chap. I, sec. iii. 
+ Stromata, Sib. v. Cap. I. | 


80 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


allowed those who were before the law to be with- 
out law, nor permitted those who were unacquainted 
with the principles of the barbarian philosophy to 
be without restraint. For, having furnished the one 
with the Commandments, and the other with philos- 
ophy, He shut up unbelief tothe Advent. So that 
every one who believes not is without excuse. For, 
by a different process, He leads both Greek and 
barbarian to the perfection which is by faith.” * 
This faith in the universal dissemination of divine 
light, even though in scattered rays, does not lessen 
in the least our obligation to be co-workers with 
Christ in bringing all men to the knowledge of His 
saving truth; it only widens our conceptions of the 
impartiality of His righteousness and the universality 
of His bountiful goodness. Moreover, while it 
stimulates thankful zeal, it relieves the impatience 
which is perplexed by the long-continued prevalence 
of wide-spread heathen darkness and the very slow 
and halting steps which mark the march of Christian 
conquest. Two thousand years came and went 
before the prophetic anticipation of the Eastern 
seer had its fulfilment, but it was not lost or for- 
gotten. The education of the world was meanwhile 
carried forward, sages and seers were raised up 
from time to time, now in one nation, now in 
another; the course of general history was ever in 
the line of the higher and clearer development of 
truth; and, in the elect nation, types and prophecies, 
and psalms and solemn sacrificial rites, were grad- 
ually weaning the people from idolatrous proclivi- 


Bb. otb. sve Cap. ite 


TO CHRISTIAN. FAITH. SI 


ties and preparing faithful souls among them for the 
great revelation of the Son of God in the fulness of 
time. Can we doubt that the educational and dis- 
ciplinary process is still ever going forward, and, by 
ways which we do not see and could not comprehend, 
He, by whose Spirit all the prophetic promises were 
inspired, is carrying on the world ever steadily and 
constantly towards the glorious consummation when 
all these prophecies shall be completely fulfilled and 
the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord 
as the waters cover the sea? 

Be it ours now, with infinitely more reason for 
thankful joy than that of the Eastern sages, to 
imitate in spirit their conduct. The “Star in the 
East” is still shining, the bright, the morning Star, 
and the Gentiles are come to its light, and kings to 
the brightness of itsrising. Itshinesupon our path ; 
it gladdens our eyes. Oh, let us walk in its light, let 
us follow its guidance. It will go before us; it will 
conduct us in the right way; it will bring us at last 


into the very presence of our Saviour and our God! 
6 


82 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


TEX: 


THE PERSONAL MANIFESTATION OF 
CARIST. 


Epiphany. 

He that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father ; and I will love 
him and will manifest Myself to him.— St. John, x7v. 21. 

THE Church in its services to-day commemorates 
the first manifestation of Christ as the Saviour of 
the world. In its earliest origin the Epiphany was 
celebrated as a phase of Christmas, and the intimate 
association of the two feasts is still marked by the 
custom of some of the Eastern Christians, who, even 
to this day, keep their Christmas on the 6th of 
January, instead of the 25th of December. It was 
the mantfestation more than the dzrth of the Re- 
deemer, which gave tone to the Christmas celebra- 
tion in the primitive Church. There is a reason 
why it should have been so, which, to Christians of 
that age, was much more obvious than to us. They 
had come into the light of Christianity as inheritors 
or immediate successors of the traditional privileges 
of the Old Testament revelation. And this, as we 
know, had been from the first, through many long 
ages, confined to one people under a special covenant. 
The revelation of God to this people had been under 
the terms of that covenant, as “ the Lord ¢hezr God,” 
and, though it had been given to the prophets to see 
and foretell that the time would come when He 
should be declared “‘the Lord of the whole earth,” 
yet the only way in which the fulfilment of this 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 83 


prediction could have been conceived as possible by 
the chosen people, was through their national exten- 
sion to universal dominion. It was something for 
which they were not prepared, and which they could 
not understand or receive, that the election of 
Jewry was only a temporary provision for the exten- 
sion of redemption to all mankind, and that as such 
it had now served its purpose and come to an end. 
And even the Gentile converts who came into the 
Christian heritage as their first successors, were 
almost equally unprepared for the conception of a 
universal religion. In all history, all over the world, 
down to that era, every nation had worshipped its 
own deity, under whose protection it was supposed 
to have its fostered welfare; and though there are 
traces of the conception of an almighty and universal 
Father, there was yet no practical realization of the 
relation of God to the world in any larger sense than 
as the patron and protector of the nation. So that to 
both Jews and Gentiles it was a new truth, which was 
now revealed, that “God hath made of one blood 
all that dwell on the earth,” and that “in every 
nation, they that fear Him and work righteousness 
are accepted of Him.” As this was the truth which © 
was specially indicated in the Epiphany commemora- 
tion, it is easy to see why the Feast of the Epiphany 
should have been marked and observed with special 
thankfulness by the early Christians. 

On the other hand, this has been now for many 
centuries an old truth, and the relations under which 
all of us have been born and brought up are, in this 
respect, just the reverse of those in the first age. To 


84 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


us there is nothing surprising, nothing for any 
special note of thankfulness, that the Sun of 
Righteousness should be “for a light to the Gen- 
tiles;”’ it is even more difficult for us to see how the 
prophetic assurance can be fulfilled that in Him 
‘‘ All Israel shall be saved.” With us, therefore, the 
difficulty is, to get a sufficient recognition of the 
Epiphany; at best, its festal character can be felt 
only asa secondary and subordinate reflection of 
the joyous rays of Christmas light. Let us not, 
however, lose sight of the fact that it is one of the 
points of superiority in the Gospel of Christ, one of 
its advantages over all other religions which have 
received the homage of men in the world, that our 
heavenly Father is herein revealed as the One 
Creator and Ruler of all, with whom there is no dif- 
ference between the Jew and the Greek, and in 
whom there is salvation for all alike, out of every 
people who sincerely come to Him. 

But, my brethren, in connection with this com- 
memorative Festival there is a question of vital and 
personal moment, which we should, every one, take 
into earnest consideration for himself, viz.: Whether 
or no we do in truth know what it is to have Christ 
savingly manifested to us? We have, unquestion- 
ably, had our birth and education in the light of His 
blessed Gospel, and familiar to us as the common- 
places of every day converse are the Scriptural 
phrases which declare Him to be the Saviour of the 
World; but, notwithstanding this, it may be very 
far from certain that we have any true knowledge of 
Him, or that in our personal experience there has 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 85 


been any veritably apprehended manifestation of 
His saving grace. The general manifestation of 
Christianity, under which we all live, is indeed an 
inestimable privilege; but it is not the same thing 
as the manifestation of Christ. That is something 
much more direct, very much closer and more per- 
sonal in both nature and application. It is, in truth, 
the immediate manifestation of Christ, as the living 
and loving Saviour to the individual soul, and the 
trustful apprehension of Him, as such, by that soul. 
This is what He plainly asserts and assures us of in 
the text: “ He that loveth Me, shall be loved of My 
Father; and I will love him, and will manifest my- 
self to him.” 

Now, let us put each one to himself the ques- 
tion: Is Christ thus manifested to me? And, to 
decide this question, let us understand clearly how 
it is that He makes such a manifestation of himself. 

Of course, we must dismiss at once all thought of 
any such manifestation as may be apprehended by 
our bodily senses. That manifestation was made, 
once for all, while He was on earth incarnate, and 
was brought to an end when He ascended up from 
earth ‘again into the heavens. But, for the bodily 
intercourse which was thus withdrawn, there was a 
substitution of intercourse which is closer and more 
comforting, even that of His Spirit, directly with 
the soul of every believing disciple. To see and 
know Him by such loving apprehension, and thus 
truly to know God in Christ, is ever the most dis- 
tinctive characteristic of a regenerate soul. 

For, on the other hand, it is ever true of the car- 


86 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


nal mind that it does not see God. It knows 
nothing of communion with Him, and has no other 
conception of Him than as a God afar off. It would 
not think of Him at all, unless forced to do so by 
the interposing influences of providential ordering ; 
but, even then, its momentary glimpse is as that of 
an infinitely distant Being, between whom and him- 
self there is nothing in common, except the pos- 
sibility of incurring His judgment of everlasting 
wrath. 

But, to the spiritual mind, God is ever present. 
It sees and knows Him, not as a God afar off, above 
the sky or below the depths; but as very nigh, and 
even within his heart and being. It is not satisfied 
until it is conscious of living, moving, and having its 
entire being in His presence, nor, unless it realize in 
that consciousness, the fulness of loving communion 
with Him. In the light of the Gospel, this spiritual 
function and attainment can be realized only by the 
apprehension of God in Christ, as it is the love of 
God through Christ which is here specially revealed 
and assured. Therefore, in the text as well as in 
other verses of the context, the Saviour speaks of 
the love, the manifestation, and the presence of 
Himself, in common terms with that of God the 
Father, and as effected through the presence and 
inspiration of the Holy Spirit. “He that loveth 
Me, shall be loved of My Father; and I will love 
him, and will manifest myself to him. Judas saith 
unto Him (not Iscariot), Lord, how is it that Thou 
wilt manifest Thyself unto us, and not unto the 
world? Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 87 


love Me, he will keep My words; and My Father 
will love him, and We will come unto him and make 
Our abode with him.” “If ye love Me, keep My 
commandments, and I will pray the Father, and He 
shall give you another Comforter that He may abide 
with you forever; even the Spirit of truth, whom 
the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, 
neither knoweth Him; but ye know Him, for He 
dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.” The ques- 
tion, then, for every one of us, is, whether or no, in our 
inner life, in the inspirations that quicken and move 
the vital affections of our innermost souls, there is 
any true knowledge of God in Christ and experience 
of loving communion with Him through the indwell- 
ing operation of the Holy Ghost? If we do not un- 
derstand what this means, or have in our experience 
no realization of it, it is to but little purpose that 
we have been born in the Gospel dispensation and 
lived amid the influences of Christian light; we are 
yet in the darkness of ignorance as to the very first 
principles of the spiritual life, and there has been to 
us no Epiphany in whose light we may claim to 
walk, or in whose beams we may rejoice. 

Consider then, I pray you, how your case stands, 
and of what sort your life is. God in Christ is re- 
vealed first and chiefly as God who pardoneth and 
saveth from sin. Have you a personal knowledge 
of genuine, heartfelt penitence for sin ? Do you 
know what it is to be conscious of its defilement, 
and in that consciousness, to abhor even yourself, 
and to cry out for deliverance and purification ? 
Do you know what it is to abominate iniquity, to 


88 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


hate everything that is evil, and to yearn for nothing 
so much as for purity and perfect righteousness ? 
Then, do you know what it is to have heard, as it were, 
a voice speaking to you directly, to you individually, 
to you in the very depths of your own personality ° 
“Took unto Me, and be saved. I am thy God, and 
will be thy salvation; wash you, make you clean with 
the atoning efficacy of My blood; be strengthened 
in the might of My Spirit. Take My yoke upon 
you, and learn of Me; for 1 am meek and lowly of 
heart, and thou shalt find rest for thy soul) zene 
question is, not whether you can recall some mo- 
ment in your past life when you had, for the mo- . 
ment, some thought or feeling, which, in your con- 
sciousness corresponded with this; the spiritual life 
is not a spasmodic vitality that moves, like an elec- 
tric shock, once in a man’s experience and thence- 
forth ceases. It is the habitual tone and temper of 
a spiritual mind always to hate sin, always to desire 
deliverance from it, always to look unto Jesus as the 
only divine and all sufficient Saviour. And, with 
this apprehension of Him as the Saviour, it appre- 
hends Him also as the source of all sanctifying grace 
and strength. 

By continual communion with His indwelling 
Spirit, the faithful soul has ever its satisfying and 
strengthening nutriment. It lives and grows thereby, 
and, in every advancing stage, realizes with more 
and more grateful satisfaction, that He is its portion 
and its everlasting salvation. 

Does any one here still ask the old question, how 
is it that Christ manifests Himself to such souls, and 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 89 


not unto the world? The answer—verified in the 
experience of millions, in every generation of Chris- 
tian believers—is, that He so manifests Himself to 
them through all the dispensations, and by all the 
dealings of His providence and grace. To the man 
that seeketh Him He is ever nigh, and His presence 
is often felt and realized with most precious assur- 
ance when there is no encouraging sign or token 
in the outer world. In the very isolation of soul 
which outward adversity occasions, communion with 
Him becomes the only refuge, and a sense of His 
abiding love the only consoling stay and support. 
Yet not in adversity only, but in hours of brightness 
and scenes of blessing as well, His approving and 
loving presence is manifested, and its recognition 
sweetens every satisfaction and heightens every joy. 
So, all providential dispensations are His manifesta- 
tions, and, in them all the eye of faith sees and the 
heart of faith adores and lovingly trusts Him. 

But, in special degree, and with peculiar assurance, 
is He manifested by the dispensations of grace. Here 
the promise to His first disciples is verified with 
ever new emphasis. “ The world seeth Me no more, 
but ye see Me; because I live, ye shall live also. 
I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you.” 
“ At that day ye shall know that Iam in my Father, 
and ye in Me, and I in you.” The Church is ever 
His living body, and prayers and sacraments have 
no other purpose but to verify and confirm the 
union of all faithful souls with Him in the perfection 
of His Heavenly life. Oh, how high, how precious 
our privilege in the realization of such Epiphanies! 


gO THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


It was permitted to St. Stephen, for a moment, just 
on the point of his release from earth in martyrdom, 
to see the Heavens opened, and the Son of Man 
standing on the right hand of God; “ but to us, if 
we have but faith to receive it, it is given to see and 
know Him condescending to our low estate, as coming 
unto us and making His abode with us, as making 
our poor hearts habitations of His Spirit, and certi- 
fying to us, that, as we become more and more true 
and constant in our love of Him, we do grow in the 
very vitality of His life, and become more and more 
one with Him, even as He is one with God. Shall 
we not receive it? Shall we not, with ever increasing 
thankfulness, find our highest joy in realizing it? 
We have but to put ourselves in the true attitude, 
for His promise stands, and will surely be verified 
in the experience of every faithful soul: “He that 
loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will 
love him and will manifest myself to him.” 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. ol 


> 
THE USE AND BENEFIT OF FASTING. 
Ash Wednesdan. 


The days will come when the Bridegroom shall be taken away 
from them, and then shall they fast.— Sz. Luke, v. 35. 


IT may be taken for granted, I presume, that all of 
us who are here this morning have some serious 
purpose for the personal improvement of this Lenten 
season; we recognize it as a season in which 
the Church provides for us special opportunities, 
and makes special calls upon us for faithful diligence 
in using the means of grace; and, in withdrawing 
this morning from the ordinary business of our daily 
life, we are seeking for a new spiritual impulse to 
stir our hearts, and strengthen our hands, and 
quicken our feet, for some marked advancement over 
that of the past—some higher and truer effort—in 
the line of Christian progress. 

We can hardly hope for success in such progress 
without some definite and well-considered plan of 
action and devotion; and it is to be hoped that this 
point has already, or is this day to have, our serious 
and prayerful thought. How shall I keep this 
Lenten season? How can I keep it in my circum- 
stances, consistently with my particular engagements 
and line of daily duty? How should I keep it, so 
that the effect shall be most thorough in elevating 
and purifying my personal life and character? These 
are questions which we must take up at the outset, 


92 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


and a well-considered answer to which must lay the 
foundation for any real progress that we may hope 
for in the course of the solemn season. 

Now, without attempting here to discuss specific 
plans, which must be determined by regard to every 
one’s particular circumstances and personal needs, I 
desire to call your attention to one religious prac- 
tice which stands out above all others as the duty 
of the season, and which the Church has unmistaka- 
bly marked as such; but which is very apt, in our 
time, to be counted as altogether obsolete, and en- 
tirely disused, or else relegated to the observance of 
a mere sentimental piety. 

I mean the duty of fasting ; and I say emphatically 
the duty of fasting, because there can be no question 
that, at least for ws, in this Church of the Bible and 
the Prayer Book, fasting is positively enjoined as of 
obligation. On one of the opening pages of the Prayer 
Book there are always to be found two tables— 
the one, “of Feasts to be observed in this Church 
throughout the year,” and the other, no less unques- 
tionably obligatory, “of fasts.” And this latter 
reads as follows: “ A table of Fasts: Ash Wednes- 
day, Good Friday,” distinctively at the head; then, 
“Other days of fasting, on which the Church re- 
quires such a measure of abstinence as is more espec- 
ially suited to extraordinary acts and exercises of 
devotion,” viz.: I. The forty days of Lent; II. The 
Ember Days at the four seasons; III. The three 
Rogation Days; and IV. All the Fridays in the 
year, except Christmas day. With these standing 
appointments unquestionably before us, there can be 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 93 


no question of the recognition or prescription of 
fasting, as a duty, on the part of our Church; nor 
would there seem to be any ground to question our 
own personal obligations in relation to it. 

But, as there can be no profit in duty performed 
as a mere perfunctory submission to recognized au- 
thority, and as the current of our modern life 
flows in a direction which is crossed and disturbed 
by anything which is supposed to have an ascetic 
tendency, it may be worth while for us to consider 
some of the reasons which have led good men and 
women in past ages to think that they were spirit- 
ually strengthened by physical fasting, and to ask if 
there is not something in these reasons to give them 
weight and profitable application in our own case ? 

In the first place, then, let it be clearly noted that 
no one in any age, not even when the meritorious- 
ness of ascetic habits was universally accepted, ever 
supposed that the mere act of abstaining from food 
was, in itself, a religious duty. Abstinence of neces- 
sity was always counted as simply starvation, as 
utterly devoid of religious effect or purpose as of 
physical comfort. So, fasting which consisted mere- 
ly of such abstinence, has never been supposed to 
have the least spiritual efficacy. Really to fast has 
always been held by religious teachers to be, like 
getting down on the knees, profitable and right 2/ 
done in connection with prayer, and for intensifying 
earnestness and humility therein ; but, otherwise, of 
no religious character whatever. The question, then, 
is always to be considered with this understanding. 
Granting that sheer abstinence from food is not 


94 THE WITNESS “OF Tis CHURCH 


fasting religiously, why should fasting ever be con- 
sidered a suitable accompaniment of prayer, or sup- 
posed to be conducive to its deeper earnestness or 
more fervent character? 

Now, in giving what I take to be the true answer 
to this question, let us begin by putting the matter 
on the lowest ground. I suppose that there is no 
one who is really in earnest in the spiritual life who 
will not admit his conscious need of some Zes¢ of his 
earnestness. In reading the teachings of our Lord 
and His Apostles, as recorded in the New Testament, 
every one must feel that there is an enormous con- 
trast between the Christian life as it is there exem- 
plified and the general condition and conduct of 
those who profess and call themselves Christians 
in these days. Much of this is involuntary and 
unavoidable. The conditions of our modern life 
throughout are different from those of that age. 
The world is near two thousand years older, and 
civilization has kept pace with its advancing age. 
In all the conditions of material comfort especially, 
there is no comparison between life now and then. 
The poorest person has access now to many things 
which the richest had not then, and some of which 
had not entered even into their highest dreams of 
possible luxury. Then again, the fact that our 
civilization is Christianized puts us all into an en- 
tirely different relation to the world from that of the 
first Christian age. There is no longer open antag- 
onism between the Church and the world. There 
is no hostility on the part of “the powers that be” 
against the Christian profession. Consequently, 


DOVCTAISLLAIN EAL TL, 95 


there is no sacrifice of position or of respectability, 
no open renunciation of associations or of interests 
in the world required of any one in making or main- 
taining this profession. And yet, the New Testa- 
ment is full of passages which assert plainly and 
unequivocally that self-denial, in some form, is an 
essential element in the Christian life; and it is im- 
possible to explain away these passages by referring 
them merely to the circumstantial conditions of 
that, or any other age of the past. They are, un- 
questionably, declarations for all time and applicable 
in every stage of civilization and to every person, of 
whatsoever rank or calling. 

Now, this being true, it must be a question for 
anxious consideration with every one who is really 
conscientious, if there be any sort of test by which 
he can prove to himself that his religion is nota 
mere form or compliance with the conventional pro- 
prieties of respectable and well-behaved society. 
And, for this purpose, there is no test so practical 
as that which is afforded by every call of the Church 
to acts which are disagreeable and requiring self- 
denial. One instance of such a test, put by our 
Lord Himself to an inquirer, is given in the Gospel: 
“Tf thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, 
and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure 
in heaven.” It was a test which the young man, 
who was rich, was unable to meet, and he “ went 
away sorrowful.” It would be hard indeed to find 
one who could meet it in these days; but we may 
thank God that there are but very few indeed—only 
here and there one—who seem, by Providential indi- 


96 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


cations, to be called to it. But the principle of the 
test is the same in a call to any form and degree of 
self-denial. The appeal is to our conscience in op- 
position to our taste and self-will; and our willing- 
ness or unwillingness to comply, for the sake of 
Christ and the Church, affords a very practical proof 
of the supremacy among our governing motives 
either of a conscientious and loving devotion to 
Christ in the one case, or of a self-seeking and self- 
pleasing spirit in the other. Now, among methods 
of self-denial, there is no one that is so readily at- 
tainable and so generally possible as that of adopt- 
ing some systematic plan, in which, from time to 
time and according to the recognized authority and 
wisdom of the Church, one puts himself upon fare 
that is less luxurious and abundant, less palatable 
and pleasing, and even harder and coarser, than his 
commonregimen. It is a form of self-denial which 
is possible for all, the rich and the poor alike; for 
luxury is relative, and the cheap indulgence of the 
very poorest has in it the same flavor of luxurious 
enjoyment that is found in the costly extravagance 
of the rich. Each must fast in the way which his 
own circumstances suggest; and the ways will in- 
deed be widely different; but the self-denial, which 
is the essence of fasting, is as possible for the oneas 
for the other. 

But this is putting religious fasting only, as we 
have said, on the lowest ground. There is another 
reason for it, which is a little higher, viz.: it is, at 
least when practised systematically and in accord- 
ance with the regulations of the Church, a testimony 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 97 


to the world of our Christian allegiance. There is 
no longer, as we have already said, any apparent an- 
tagonism between the Church and the world. Ever 
since the conversion of Constantine, in the fourth 
century, the Church has been acknowledged by the 
world as the mother and mistress of civilization, and 
to her has been generally conceded the administra- 
tion of the moral influences in human society. Cot: 
sequently, there is no longer occasion for the open 
and visible separation of the Church from the world 
which was absolutely necessary in the first ages. 
And yet it is plain that, if Christianity is to be a 
really effective power, moving on society and lifting 
it upward constantly towarda higher spiritual plane, 
‘t must be known and recognized as having a positive 
character; and its faithful disciples must have some 
distinguishing marks, by which they are known as 
“a separate and peculiar people,” “in the world, but 
not of the world.” But, open separation being now, 
as we have said, impracticable, and a separation by 
formal marks, as, for instance, by a particular style of 
dress or of speech, having been in the experience of 
modern sectarianism, tried and found wanting, the 
true secret of such influence seems clearly to lie in a 
faithful conformity to the appointments and direc- 
tions of the Church, which have borne the test of 
many ages, and been found, in the experience of 
millions of saintly men and women, to be most ef- 
fectual in giving tone and character to the spiritual 
life. This is true, emphatically and pre-eminently, 
of the Church appointments of feasts and fasts 
throughout the year. For, in the due observance 


v 


98 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH. 


of these, the time of our mortal life, with all its 
occupations and interests is Christianized; and the 
faithful members of the Church are seen everywhere 
and by all, as “using the world, but not abusing it ;” 
and even the children of the world themselves recog- 
nize the wisdom of. this moderation, and, in mere 
shame hush, for a time, the sounds of their revelry, 
and abridge the excesses of their dissipation, and curb 
and suppress the extravagances of their customary 
over-indulgence. So “the testimony of Jesus” has 
freer course and gains new power, as a witness 
against the corruption that is in the world, and 
Christian example is a manifest power for its refor- 
mation and elevation. 

But, my Christian brethren, while there is certainly 
reason in such considerations as these for our ob- 
servance of the fasts, as wellas the feasts, which have 
been appointed by the Church, there is, as I hope 
some of us have already found in our experience, 
much higher ground for the practice of fasting 
among the systematic devotional habits of the 
Christian life. Most of the considerations that we 
have now taken into account would be applicable to 
‘any form of self-denial or self-discipline which might 
be sanctioned by the Church; but there is much 
more to be said, and more that is positively and dis- 
tinctively Christian, in recommending the particular 
form of self-denial, which is, properly, fasting. 

It is a fact, as remarkable as it is unquestionable, 
that, in all ages and under all dispensations, they 
who have been eminent as saints of God have been 
known as serving Him “ with prayer and fasting ;” and 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 99 


this fact is alone sufficient to indicate that there 
must be apparent to persons who are really spirit- 
ually minded, some special fitness in this particular 
form of self-denial, as well as, in their experience, 
some proved use and efficacy for self-discipline and 
purification. Unquestionably, this is true. And 
the key to it may be found in the fact that in devo- 
tional abstinence from food there is a special recog- 
nition of the original source of sin in the world. 
Renovation, or even reformation, must begin with a 
humble recognition of its need in the fallen condi- 
tion of our natural state and character ; and the 
same divine revelation which has brought us the 
knowledge of salvation, has taught us that sin came 
originally through yielding to fleshly appetite. What 
more obviously fit, then, whether it be in prostrate 
self-abasement, or for needful self-discipline, or as 
seeking for a personal participation in the counter- 
acting efficacy of the divine redemption; what, I ask, 
more obviously fit than the religious minded curb- 
ing of our fleshly appetite, and our proved mastery 
over it by occasional denials of even its guiltless 
gratification? This is, no doubt, the key to the 
general adoption of fasting in the devotional habits 
of the most earnest and successful seekers after holi- 
ness. 

Accordingly, in adopting this practice for our- 
selves, we have the advantage of knowing and feeling 
that we are in their company ; our spirit is attuned 
in unison with theirs; we are consciously trying to 
be, and in our measure feel that we are, like minded 
with them, and we gain immense supplies of spirit- 


100 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


ual strength in this saintly communion. Above all, 
we know that we are in communion with the divine 
Saviour; that in fasting we are following His ex- 
ample, walking in His steps, and “ filling up in our 
flesh that which is behind of His sufferings for His 
body’s sake.” 

So, then, it is not surprising that there is found 
to be special use and efficacy in devotional fasting; 
that, above other modes of self-denial, it has, when 
faithfully adopted, in submission to the wise direction 
of the Church and with devoted regard to both the 
example and the injunctions of our Saviour, peculiar 
influences to beget in us “‘a deeper humiliation and 
a more chastened spirit in carrying on His will; a 
more thorough insight into ourselves, and a closer 
communion with God; a more resolute and consist- 
ent practice of self-denying charity; a more lively 
realizing of things spiritual; a warning to the world 
of God’s truth and its own peril.” 

Let us all resolve, brethren, to try it, for once, 
honestly and systematically, during the Lenten 
season now before us. Each one must determine 
for himself how, in his circumstances and for his in- 
dividual needs, he can fast most profitably ; whether 
it be by entire abstinence for the whole or a part of 
given days, or simply by cutting off indulgence in 
some particular for which he has a special liking. 
‘He who pronounced a blessing upon the gift of a 
cup of cold water to a disciple in His name, will also 
bless any act of sincere self-denial practised in mem- 
ory of Him. Only let us not mock God, let us 
deny ourselves in something which is to us really 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. IOI 


self-denial; let us, in whatever degree we may be 
able to bear it without diminishing our own useful- 
ness, put ourselves to some inconvenience, in sorrow 
and shame for those sins, ‘the lust of the flesh, the 
lust of the eye, and the pride of life,’ which made 
our Saviour a man of sorrows, and exposed Him to 
shame ;” and then I am sure that “we shall not after- 
wards think the practice degrading to Him, or with- 
out meaning.” 

In conclusion, I adopt the words of one of the old 
homilies: ‘“ Let us, therefore, dearly beloved, seeing 
that there are many more causes of fasting and 
mourning” for sin “in these our days than hath 
been of many years heretofore in any one age, en- 
deavor ourselves, both inwardly in our hearts and 
also outwardly with our bodies, diligently to exercise 
this goodly exercise of fasting in such sort and man- 
ner as the holy prophets, the Apostles, and divers 
other devout persons for their time used the same. 
God is now the same God that He was then; God 
that loveth righteousness and hateth iniquity ; God 
which willeth not the death of a sinner, but rather 
that he turn from his wickedness and live ; God that 
hath promised to turn to us, if we refuse not to turn 
to Him; yea, if we turn from our evil works before 
His eyes, cease to do evil, learn to do well, seek to 
do right, relieve the oppressed, be a right judge to 
the fatherless, defend the widow, break our bread 
to the hungry, bring the poor that wander into our 
house, clothe the naked, and despise not our brother 
which is our own flesh. Then thou shalt call, saith 
the prophet, and the Lord shall answer. Thou 


102 LAL WITNESS TOF ST fee CH ORCH 


shalt cry, and He shalt say, here am-I. Yea, God 
which heard Ahab and the Ninevites and spared 
them, will also hear our prayersand spare us, so that 
we, after their example, will unfeignedly turn unto 
Him; yea, He will help us with His heavenly bene- 
dictions the time that we have to tarry in this world, 
and, after the race of this mortal life, He will bring 
us to His heavenly kingdom, where we shall reign in 
everlasting blessedness with our Saviour Christ. 
“To whom, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, 
be all honor and glory, forever and ever. Amen.” 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 103 


XI. 


ANGELIC SUCCOR, THROUGH PRAYER 
AND FASTING. 


Lent. 


From the first day that thou didst set thy heart to understand, and 
to chasten thyself before God, thy words were heard, and I am come 
for thy words. But the prince of the Kingdom of Persia withstood 
me one and twenty days; but lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, 
came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia. 
Now I am come to make thee understand. —Danzel, x. 12-14. 


In the beginning of this chapter, the prophet 
Daniel represents himself as having been for three 
full weeks in humiliation, fasting and prayer, 
before God. “In those days,” he says, “1, Daniel, 
was mourning three full weeks. I ate no pleasant 
bread, neither came flesh, nor wine, in my mouth, 
until three whole weeks were fulfilled.” 

To see the reason of his fasting and mourning, and 
so to get at the significance of the angel’s declaration 
to him, which is contained in the text, we must re- 
call the fact that a similar prostration of himself in 
fasting and supplication, five years before, had been 
followed as an unquestionable consequence to his 
faith, by the termination of the Jewish captivity ; 
and that now the hands and hearts of the returned 
exiles were weakened, and the rebuilding of the walls 
of Jerusalem hindered, by wicked opposition. At 
this his spirit must have been deeply stirred within 
him. He was too aged to go and set forward the 


104 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


work with his own hands, for he was now at least 
ninety years of age; and, besides, his presence and 
influence were, doubtless, needed in the Persian 
court. Therefore, his recourse was precisely that 
which we should have expected to see in him, when 
he tells us that he devoted himself to prayer and 
fasting, and, for three full weeks, ate no pleasant 
bread, neither came flesh nor wine into his mouth. 

And now, let us note the result. At the end of 
that time he lifted up his eyes; and, behold, there 
stood by him “a man clothed in linen, whose loins 
were girded with fine gold of Uphaz, whose body 
was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of 
lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms 
and his feet like in color to polished brass. And the 
voice of his words lixe the voice of a multitude.” 
This heavenly messenger (for such we may be 
assured he was) thus addressed him: “O, Daniel, a 
man greatly beloved, understand the words that I 
speak unto thee, and stand upright; for unto thee 
am I now sent. Then said he: fear not, Daniel; for 
Srom the first day that thou didst set thy heart to 
understand, and to chasten thyself before thy God, 
thy prayers were heard, and Jam come for thy words. 
But, the prince of the Kingdom of Persia withstood 
me one and twenty days; but, lo, Michael, one of the 
chief princes, came to help me; and I remained 
there with the kings of Persia. Now I am come to 
make thee understand what shall befall thy people 
in the latter days.” 

See, then, my brethren, what a contest in the 
spiritual world the prayer and fasting of one man 


LORCHRISTIAN: PALIT, 105 


may occasion. In this, as in other inspired records 
of the contests of the principalities and powers in 
heavenly places, there is much, of course, which is 
mysterious and above our comprehension; but thus 
much seems to be clear in fact; that, on the very 
first day in which Daniel began to chasten himself 
before God, an angel was dispatched from the court 
of Heaven to his relief. This angel was met and 
resisted by another spirit, called in the text, the 
“Prince of the Kingdom of Persia,” as Satan is called 
by our Lord “the prince of this world.” Between 
these a fierce contest ensued. Meanwhile, Daniel 
continued his self-chastisement and supplications for 
three full weeks. Then, Michael, one of the chief 
captains of the heavenly host, comes to the relief 
of the first angel and subdues the opposing one. 
Whereupon, Daniel is visited and cheered, and 
strengthened and enlightened ! 

The practical inferences for us, which this history 
obviously suggests, are possibly liable to be obscured 
by our thinking of it as a chapter in the Old Testa- 
ment, colored with the imagery of Oriental mysti- 
cism, and relating to a dispensation far back in 
antiquity, and in all respects unlike this in which we 
are living. I will ask you, therefore, before present- 
ing these inferences, to turn with me for a moment to 
the New Testament and read there an account of an 
incident in Christian history which is so clearly paral- 
lel with this in all the essential features as to relieve 
it of any such obscurity, whether for our faith or our 
practical application. In the tenth chapter of the 
book of the Acts of the Apostles, we read that 


106 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


“there was a certain man in Cesarea, called Corne- 
lius, a. centurion of the band called the Italian band: 
a devout man, and one that feared God, with all his 
house ; who gave much alms to the people, and prayed 
to God always.’ He, too, as Daniel, was fasting and 
praying, not indeed for so long time, but until the 
ninth hour of the day; and, lo, to him likewise ap- 
peared an angel, who said unto him: “ Thy prayersand 
thine alms are come up for a memorial before God.” 

Need we hesitate, then, my brethren? Can we 
doubt? May we not rather, and shall we not, take 
it home to our hearts as a truth unquestionably re- 
vealed in the Word of God, that our humiliation and 
prayer—the humiliation and prayer of such poor 
worms of the dust as we are—have power and effi- 
cacy beyond the boundaries of time and space, can 
and do rise above the noise and strife of terrestrial 
things, are heard and known in highest heaven, and 
obtain for us celestial visitants, angelic ministers, to 
fight our battles, strengthen our weaknesses, help 
our infirmities, enlighten our eyes, cheer our hearts, 
and save our souls? Was it not to assure us of this 
that the prayer and fasting of Daniel are recorded ? 
Was it not for this that the prayer and fasting of 
Cornelius are recorded? Do we not see an illustration 
of it in the fast of Elijah, who was likewise visited 
and strengthened by an angel? And, above all, was 
it not for this that when our blessed Lord had fasted 
forty days and forty nights it is recorded that “angels 
came and ministered unto Him?” 

Take it to your hearts, then, my brethren, not as 
a notion or conceit, not as a poetic or religious 


TO CHRISTIAN FAIT#. 107 


fancy, not as a conception of sentimental piety, but 
as a veritable truth of the gospel and of life; and so 
improve this Lenten season that you may have a 
blessed experience of its life and power. I am sure 
that of all truths none is more needed by us, none 
more worth an honest, earnest endeavor to grasp 
and hold with a clear, strong, persistent faith, than 
just this. It is almost a lost truth. It is admitted, 
indeed it must be admitted, to be contained in the 
Bible; and we are all, no doubt, ready to concede 
that we ought to believe it in a weak, sentimental 
way, as an act of piety; but to hold it as veritable 
fact, and really to betake ourselves to a systematic 
course of self-humiliation and extraordinary devo- 
tion, with a serious expectation of enlisting angelic 
movements and ministrations in our behalf ;—Ah, 
this is something which is so remote from the habit- 
ual thought and feeling of the times in which we are 
living, that one can hardly propose it without sus- 
picion of being very superstitious. But, neverthe- 
less, the truth of God standeth sure, and “ man doth 
not tive by bread alone”; human souls with all their 
spiritual needs and aspirations cannot be sustained 
and satisfied by mere material cognitions in this 
age any more than the days of old. The grasp of 
faith, now as ever, must be on the unseen, and it is 
strong only as it realizes the verities of the spiritual 
world. When the incarnate Son of God, who know- 
eth all things, said explicitly of the power of dispos- 
sessing and overmastering evil spirits: “ This kind 
goeth not out but by prayer and fasting,’ He ut- 
tered a truth too mysterious for the philosophy of 


108 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


our age to apprehend, too spiritual for the religious 
faith of this age to recognize; but true, nevertheless, 
and as true in this nineteenth century as in the first. 

The sacred season into whose solemn shadows we 
are just now entering calls us to humiliation, to sor- 
rowing repentance, to self-mortification, to fasting 
and earnest prayer. You will hear the call but 
coldly, and your endeavors to comply with it will be 
exceedingly hard and dry and formal, the mere per- 
functory performance of a prescribed routine, unless 
you carry into it living spiritual faith, and find in its 
services and duties an increasing realization of spir- 
itual verities. 

With such faith, then, dear brethren, humble 
yourselves in the sight of God now, and He shall 
lift you up. Be.afflicted and mourn now, and your 
heaviness shall ultimately be turned to joy. Mourn, 
first of all for yourselves, for your own personal 
sins ; weep and lament that you have made s0 little 
progress in the divine life, that the flesh with its 
affections and lusts is still so strong, that your faith 
and love are so weak. Repent of your shortcom- 
ings and backslidings, and pray God to help you 
throw aside every weight and the sin which doth so 
easily beset you, that you may, hereafter, press for- 
ward with ever increasing zeal toward the mark of 
the prize of your high calling in Christ Jesus. Be 
afflicted and mourn for your country, that it is so 
stained by dishonesty, so lacerated by fraud, so 
threatened by corrupt factions—dead alike to con- 
science and to shame. Be afflicted and mourn for 
the Church, that its zeal has become so nerveless and 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITI. 109 


impotent, its love so cold, its faith so weak. Like 
Daniel, set your face unto the Lord God by prayer 
and supplication, with fasting and sack-cloth and 
ashes; and beseech Him to behold the city that is 
called by His name, and cause His face to shine 
upon His sanctuary as in the ancient days. Pray 
for the Church as related to you in your own parish, 
that it may receive the dews of God’s blessing, that 
the word preached and the means of grace dis- 
pensed here may be efficacious to the awakening of 
the careless and impenitent, to the reclaiming of the 
backsliding and them that are gone out of the way, 
and to the building up of the faithful in all the holy 
eraces of the Christian life. Pray for the Church 
throughout this great city and diocese ; that it may 
rise to a truer consciousness of its advantages and 
responsibilities, and gird itself with renewed strength 
for its holy work. Pray for the Church throughout 
our common country, that its stakes may be 
strengthened and its cords lengthened yet more and 
more, and that all its parts may be at the same time 
so bound together that neither the subtilty of men 
or devils may be able to rend them asunder. Pray 
for the Church in our motherland. Pray for the 
Church throughout all the world, as the Saviour 
prayed, that all may be one, even as the Father and 
the Sonareone. Pray for them that are ignorant and 
out of the way. Pray for the careless and impeni- 
tent. Pray for your own kindred. Pray for our 
common humanity. 

And, if in this congregation to-day, there be any 
who are not yet enrolled as members of the house- 


IIo LHE WITNESS OF THE -CHURCH 


hold of faith, who have not by baptism put on 
Christ, or have hitherto lived in neglect of their 
plighted duties; let them find in the warnings and 
calls of this holy season, their present saving op- 
portunity. Yes, beloved, now for you is the day of 
salvation, now is the accepted time. Oh, let this 
beginning of the-Lenten season find you on your 
knees humbling yourself before God, deprecating 
His wrath and supplicating His mercy; let every 
succeeding day find you in like mind and employ- 
ment; and this season of forty days shall not pass 
before your prayers shall be heard, and your soul 
richly blessed. Aye, on the very first day that thou 
shalt set thine heart to chasten thyself before God, 
thy words shall be heard; and a mighty contest shall 
be commenced for thee in the spiritual world; 
Michael and his angels contending with the dragon 
and his angels. The contest may be long, it may be 
severe, yea, a sword may pierce through thine own 
soul also; but continue thy supplications, rise not 
from thy humiliation, pray without ceasing; and 
there will assuredly, for Christ Himself hath prom- 
ised it, be joy for thee in Heaven among the angels 
of God. 


IO CHRISTIAN FAITH. II! 


LA: 
THE HUMILIATION OF THE ETERNAL SON. 


Passion Week. 


Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be 
equal with God: but made Himself of no reputation, and took 
upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of 
men ; and, being found in fashion asa man, He humbled Himself 
and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.— P77. 
tr On}. O. 


THE calls of the Church inthe first weeks of Lent 
are to self-examination, to self-discipline, to repent- 
ance and turning unto God; in these last, our 
thoughts, without precluding the sense of our need 
of repentance, are more especially directed to a con- 
sideration of the Redeemer’s sufferings, by which 
grace and power were purchased forus. The text 
may well subserve this purpose in our meditation 
now, as it puts distinctly before us, and calls for our 
direct and undoubting recognition of the Person 
who thus suffered for us as being in the mystery of 
a double nature, both God and man. It will be a 
fitting preparation, please God, for Good Friday, to 
fix, as far as we can, in our minds, the thought of 
who our Saviour is, and what, in order to be our 
Saviour, He condescended to become. It is indeed 
a very sacred and awful subject, and one of which 
we ought not to speak, we ought not to hear, with- 
out great reverence and a careful guarding of our 
thoughts as well as our words. May He, who 


I12 THE WITNESS OF (THE CHURCH 


searcheth the heart and trieth the reins, help us to 
take up this meditation and to carry it on through 
this solemn season, with a fittingly chastened tem- 
per and purity of spirit. 

First of all, then, when we are meditating on our 
Lord’s sufferings and death on the cross for us, we 
must remember and understand clearly that in those 
sufferings and that death, He was not a mere martyr. 
And this means a clear recognition and belief of two 
very profound truths: that He was not a mere man; 
and that He suffered and died not for His own sake 
or account. 

He was not a mere man; He was verily, and that 
from eternity, the only begotten Son of Almighty 
God. The text tells us this very clearly: “Who, 
being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to 
be equal with God.” And the assertion here is 
abundantly sustained by the entire tone and im- 
port of the New Testament Scriptures. It is not 
necessary to quote the many passages which plain- 
ly assert His divinity, since they are constantly 
brought before us in the commemorative services 
of the Church in this solemn season. “Day by 
day we magnify Him and we worship His name 
ever, world without end,’ which would be sheer 
idolatry, were He not the very and Eternal God, 
our Maker and Lord. The faith of the Church on 
this point is, and has ever been, most clear and de- 
cided; and in holding fast to it the saints of all ages 
have lived and died. It has been, everywhere and 
among all who profess and call themselves Chris- 
tians, the inspiring source of the adoring homage, of 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 113 


the unspeakably grateful and loving devotion which 
has been the accredited characteristic of Christian 
worship. There could have been no such homage 
or devotion had Jesus been accounted a mere man. 
For, in that case, there would have been no special 
condescension in His low estate, in His privations, 
or even His persecutions, in the world. He was 
but a peasant of Galilee, and His poverty was but 
the common lot of His class. If He met with oppo- 
sition from the rulers of the nation in His public 
ministry, this was only what might reasonably have 
been looked for by one making and publicly assert- 
ing His pretensions; and even His final execution 
was but a contingency, the risk of which He must 
have been willing to run for the sake of the tempo- 
rary notoriety and influence which His claim to the 
Messiahship would secure. It is shocking to speak 
in this way of our adorable Redeemer. But at 
should be clearly understood that only thus could 
He be spoken or thought of if He were not believed 
to be very God. As man merely, His claim upon 
our homage and devotion, or even our common 
gratitude, would be decidedly inferior to those 
which had for centuries before His day been ac- 
corded by millions in the great Indian Empire still 
further East, to their reputed Messiah, Gotama- 
Buddha; for the record of the life of that Eastern 
sage was one of poverty, of lonely wanderings, of 
pure self-abnegation, of thought only for others and 
goodness toward others, very similar to that of 
Jesus; and he was, at thesame time, the undisputed 


son of a King, to whom, therefore, all this privation 
8 


II4 THE WITNESS OF .THE CHURCH 


and suffering were the voluntary assumption of his 
own purely unselfish benevolence. Our Saviour, 
the Lord Jesus, being from eternity very God of 
very God, when He became man and took on Him 
the form of a servant, submitted Himself indeed to 
a voluntary condescension, with which the conde- 
scension of any earthly king could make no claim 
to parallel. But the condescension, let: us always 
remember, was in Him possible, or possible its grate- 
ful recognition by Christian believers, only on the 
assurance of a well-grounded faith in His eternal 
and Divine preéxistence. 

Directly consequent on this point of faith, follows 
another no less fundamental and of practical im- 
portance in the Christian heart, viz.: that His suf- 
ferings and death were not for His own sake or on 
His own account. They were voluntary, as the con- 
ditions of the earthly life in which they were in- 
volved were self-assumed by Him; but the assump- 
tion, with all its inevitably humiliating and agonizing 
consequences, was, purely and solely, for the re- 
demption of our fallen race. Had the death of Jesus, 
by public execution, more than eighteen centuries 
ago in Judea, been that only of a religious pretender, 
or even of a martyr, it would long since have had 
its place only in the records of ancient history. But, 
because it is not only that, but believed and known 
to be the sacrificial oblation of the Great High 
Priest for the world’s redemption; therefore its 
commemoration is pregnant ever with application to 
the living present, and appeals with increasing claims 
for the profoundest gratitude and the most trustful 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 115 


and loving devotion of every living soul. The suf- 
ferings and death of the Word Incarnate could not 
pass away like a dream; they could not be a mere 
martyrdom, or a mere display or figure of some- 
thing else; they must have a virtue in them; and 
their perpetual commemoration is but tnewncver 
present recognition and application of this virtue as 
our reconciliation to God, the expiation of our sins, 
and our new creation in holiness for the life ever- 
lasting. “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse 
of the law, being made a curse for us.” He hath 
“ made peace by the blood of Hiscross.”  “ He hath 
reconciled us in the body of His flesh, through death, 
to present us holy and unblameable, and unreprove- 
able in His sight.” ‘Surely, He hath borne our griefs 
and carried our sorrows.” “ He was wounded for our 
transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities ; the 
chastisement of our peace was upon Him and with 
His stripes we are healed.” “ We believe, then, that 
when Christ suffered on the cross, our nature suffered 
in Him. Human nature, fallen and corrupt, was 
under the wrath of God, and it was impossible that 
it should be restored to His favor till it had expiated 
its sin by suffering. Why this was necessary we 
know not; but we are told expressly that ‘we are 
all, by nature, children of wrath,’ that, ‘ by the deeds 
of the law there shall no flesh be justified,’ and that, 
‘the wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the 
people that forget God.’ The Son of God, then, 
graciously took our nature on Him, that in Him it 
might do and suffer what in itself was impossible to 
it. What it could not effect of itself, it could effect 


116 FHL WITNESS OF THE. CHURCH 


in Him. He carried it about Him through a life of 
penance; He carried it forward to agony and death. 
In Him our sinful nature died, and rose again. 
When it died on the cross that death was its new 
creation. In Him it satisfied its old and heavy debt; 
for the presence of His divinity gave it transcendent 
merit. His presence had kept it pure from sin from 
the first, His hand had carefully selected the choicest 
specimen of our nature, and, separating it from all 
defilement, His personal indwelling hallowed it and 
gave it power. And thus, when it had been offered 
up upon the cross, and made perfect by suffering, 
it became the first fruits of a new man; it became 
a divine leaven of holiness for the new birth and 
spiritual life of as many as should receive it. And 
thus, as the Apostle says, ‘if one died for all, then 
were all dead;’ ‘our old man is crucified in Him,’ 
‘that the body of sin might be destroyed,’ and, 
‘together with Christ,’ ‘when we were dead in sins, 
hath he quickened us and raised us up together, and 
made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ 
Jesus.’”"* How amazing, how overwhelming this 
truth; God Himself suffering on the cross; the 
Almighty, Everlasting God, in the form ofa servant, 
with human flesh and blood, wounded, insulted, 
dying; andall this as an expiation for human sin! 
Howamazing! And yet, if it be true, how necessary 
for our most faithful and grateful acceptation. 

If it be true. And, if we think that this can be 
now a question, we must remember that its truth 
has been verified by sixty generations who have lived 


* Newman’s Parochial Sermons, vol. ii. p. 453. 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. II7 


and died in the faith of it, and that it has borne the 
test of near twenty centuries of investigation and of 
experience, with its constant application to human 
need in every possible phase and relation. IT IS 
TRUE. It is the truth which we need, every one, for 
the pardon of our sins and for the sustenance and 
comfort of our souls. 

Now, therefore, when this truth is specially and 
most impressively brought home to us, when the 
Church in all its solemn’ services is setting Christ be- 
fore us as the Great High Priest of our profession, 
through whose oblation of Himself once offered 
we have perpetual redemption ; oh, let there be no 
halting in our faith. And let us try, by devoutly 
meditating on the mystery of His passion, to break 
up in our hearts the habit of resting in the merely 
traditionary generalities of faith. Let it be one, and 
that not the least, of the devotional aims of this 
solemn season, to get for ourselves a more specific 
realization of the true nature, as well as the infinite 
worth, of our Redeemer’s condescension and suffer- 
ings for us. Let us take some little time in each 
day to lift up our thoughts and fix them on the con- 
templation of what He was in the infinite majesty 
of His eternal existence, and then of what He con- 
descended to become, and to what humiliation and 
suffering He submitted himself in the work of our 
redemption. Let us be especially careful to take 
into our faith the apprehension of that condescen- 
sion and the consequent sufferings as veritable, and 
in the truest possible sense and degree real—real in 
fact and in the Saviour’s consciousness. Let us re- 


118 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


member that though He ever was, and is, God, He 
became truly man, and in His incarnation submitted 
Himself, and that even in His Godhead, to all the 
sinless conditions of human life and experience. 
And in the veritable truth of His incarnation we 
have the conceivable assurance of His possible subjec- 
tion to the real experience of suffering, even as God. 
Our understanding stands aghast at the thought 
of God suffering, and asks if could it be possible for 
a Divine Being, having in Himself all sufficiency, 
comprehending all things in His knowledge, and 
having command of all forces in His power, yet to 
be compassed by human infirmity and tied and 
bound in the chains of human sorrow? Most cer- 
tainly it could not be possible unless He had become 
man in the very truth of man’s nature. But then 
it would be possible; for even Divinity incarnate 
must be true to the essential conditions of a nature 
to which It had subjected Itself. And if it be diffi- 
cult for us to put together the thought of a Divine, 
and, at the same time, a suffering Being, it is equally 
difficult to put together the conception of evena 
human intellect in its fullest manifestation of intel- 
ligence and enjoyment, and yet, in the same person, 
by change merely of physical conditions, dwarfed 
even to idiocy. Think of the intellectual compre- 
hensiveness of a Shakespeare—how abundant, how 
many sided, how full of all possible phases of life’s 
experience must have been his consciousness; and 
yet, Shakespeare in his infancy was but a prattling 
babe, and in his mature age, had but the hand of 
disease laid its touch upon his brain, he would have 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. IIg 


become but a drivelling idiot! So inexorable are 
the laws of nature: so unexceptional the subjec- 
tion of every one brought within the conditions of 
its life. When, therefore, the only begotten Son of 
Almighty God determined to take upon Him our 
human nature, He knew full well that such conde- 
scension must needs involve an entire subjection to 
all the essential conditions of this nature ; and it was 
but the legitimate and necessary carrying out of that 
determination, when, “being found in fashion as a 
man,” He halted not in full obedience to the law of 
His human life, but went on unflinchingly in the 
path of sacrifice, and “humbled himself and be- 
came obedient unto death, even the death of the 
cross.” 

Oh, wondrous love, to submit to such an infinite 
depth of condescension, to put Himself under such 
an overwhelming weight of suffering; but, blessed 
be His name, we know that the condescension and 
the suffering were as real to Him as they are of 
unspeakable worth to us. Therefore, let our hearts 
be lifted up in most thankful recognition of His 
great mercy toward us; and let us draw near unto 
God, through Him, in full assurance of faith, know- 
ing, that having passed through His sufferings, He 
is now exalted at the right hand of the Majesty on 
high to plead the merits of those sufferings in the 
functions of an everlasting Priesthood, by which He 
is able to save to the uttermost all them that come 
unto God by Him. 


120 LHE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


XIII. 
PW ATTRACTIVE POW LR OF THECROS 


@ood Fridan. 


And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto 
me.—St. John, xtt. 32. 

THIS is one of those most solemn and momentous 
sayings which our Lord spake in the city, and proba- 
bly in the temple, of Jerusalem, during the week pre- 
ceding His crucifixion. The Evangelist tells us that 
He spake this, “Signifying what death he would 
die.” The being “lifted up from the earth,” of 
which He here speaks, must therefore be understood 
to refer, not as we might infer from the words, to 
His ascension to Heaven and His exaltation on the 
throne of glory there, but to that cruel and igno- 
minious lifting up of His body, which was witnessed, 
and which He foresaw would be witnessed, but a few 
days thereafter on the Cross of Calvary. Thus 
“lifted up, He knew full well that He was to be ex- 
posed to the malignity of His enemies and the scorn 
of the world; He knew that death by crucifixion 
was, not only most painful, but also most ignomin- 
ious; that none but those who were adjudged the 
vilest criminals were subjected to it; and that in it 
He would, therefore, seem to have the brand of in- 
famy stamped indelibly upon His character; that 
He would thereby be accounted both in the judg- 
ment of law and the estimation of the world, one “ ac- 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. I21 


cursed.” And yet, my brethren, it was in reference 
to that very death, and with the full knowledge of 
all its ignominious circumstances, that He made the 
prediction in the text, and declared, that, so far from 
consigning Him, as it was intended, and as it did in 
fact consign others, to infamy and oblivion, it would 
be the source of His mightiest and most slorious 
triumphs, drawing all men unto Him and causing 
Him to be esteemed throughout all generations, as 
the only hope, not only of Israel, but of all the ends 
of the earth. 

What a marvellous prediction to make concerning 
such a fact! How incredible it must have seemed 
to the Jews, if they had any apprehension of its 
meaning. But, my brethren, how numerous are the 
evidences which we have of its truth! How many 
and how clear the facts which we can point to in 
proof that it has been, and is ever being, fulfilled ! 
Yes, incredible as it must have appeared to the 
Jews, and marvellous as the fact is to all human ap- 
prehension, it is, nevertheless, completely verified 
in all the Christian history of near two thousand 
years, and will, without doubt, continue to be, even 
unto the end, that the Cross of Christ is, as it were, 
a universal magnet, the attractive power of which 
is ever felt in all spiritual life, so that, by it, the 
redeemed are drawn together in one, out of all 
nations and tribes of mankind. 

See, in the first place, how it has drawn together 
all nations. 

Before that sacrificial oblation was made by Christ 
on Calvary, and apart from its influence, the ten- 


[22 {HE WIIWNESS: OF THE: CHURCH 


dency of national distinctions has ever been exclusive 
and separative. Not only does every nation seek 
to maintain its own natural boundaries and its 
own political institutions, but even in its religion 
it aims to be independent of, and separate from, 
all other nations. In heathenism, universally, every 
people and country-has gods of its own. And from 
the earliest ages it has been so, as it is undoubt- 
edly true that national pride was one of the first 
principles at work in the corruption of primitive 
tradition, by which the truth of God was changed 
into a lie, and the worship and service of various 
creatures was substituted for that of Him who is the 
One Creator of all. Even the Divine dispensation 
previous to the death of Christ was a national dis- 
pensation. The Almighty chose a people unto Him- 
self, and made to that people His revelations and 
His promises. True, this was not in the end for 
their own exclusive benefit ; but, so long as the dis- 
pensation lasted, its privileges were confined to 
them, and all its institutions were designed to keep 
them asa nation distinct and separate from all others. 

So then, it is true, as we have said, that in all his- 
tory, apart from that which is Christian, the ten- 
dency of national institutions has ever been towards 
separation and antagonism, breaking up the great 
human family into sections apart from, and hostile 
to each other. First, in the very lowest stage of ad- 
vancement, in that state which our men of science 
call the state of nature, there is the drawing off of 
families into tribes, and these are in perpetual hos- 
tility with each other; so that the most character- 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 123 


istic designation of those of our race who are in that 
state is that of savages. Then, advancing beyond 
that into the heathen civilization when tribes have 
become merged into nations, the principles of hostile 
antagonism are not in the least degree abated ; but, 
on the contrary, are seen to be still in existence and 
in operation, with mightier energy, and on a far 
more extensively destructive scale. So that, human 
history, in all its stages of advancing civilization, has 
been, thus far, but little else than a history of con- 
quest and war. Nowhere among all the nations of 
heathenism, not even in the Platonic cultivation of 
classic Greece, can you find anything like a real ap- 
prehension of the idea of a common, universal broth- 
erhood. You will find Greeks, Romans, Assyrians, 
Egyptians, proud of their several national distinc- 
tions and fierce to maintain them against the world ; 
but you will not find anywhere the conception of a 
common Head with common bonds of relationship 
extending from Him to all its members, even to the 
most remote and the most obscure, so that.ifrone 
suffer, all suffer, and if one rejoice, all have cause 
for joy. Nowhere in heathenism or even in Judaism 
do you find such a conception of unity and brother- 
hood. 

But how familiar to us all is it in Christendom. 
True, we have come very far short, as yet, of the 
realization of it as a fact ; but as an idea, as the true 
condition of humanity, as that which we are to aim 
at and struggle for, it is most unquestionably appre- 
hended by us all. And even infidels and scoffers at 
revelation have taken it up, and made it their shib- 

x \ 


124. THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


boleth, claiming each one that his own diluted re- 
production of old exploded heathen philosophy is 
charged with this specific virtue, to secure, with 
universal infallibility, the fraternal unity of our 
race, 

But the truth is purely and exclusively a Christian 
truth. Christ, in being lifted up on the cross, has 
become a centre of attraction to all nations, and 
the principles of His cross have become a common 
bond of sympathy in all human life. National dis. 
tinctions exist; national power is maintained; and 
so, national affection and pride, all that constitutes 
patriotism, are as possible, and may be as strong as 
before. But the walls of separation are really 
broken down, so that there is necessary alienation 
no longer, there are divers gods no longer, and sep- 
arate religions no longer; but, in every nation and 
from all people, in every language and tongue, com- 
mon prayers and praises go up to the common Lord 
and Father. And there is more and more, in just the 
degree in which the principles of Christ and His 
cross are operative, a realization of the remarkable 
description of the Christian world, which was given 
even as early as the second century, that, “there is 
no nation whatever, whether barbarian or Greek, or 
by whatever other name called, whether living in 
wagons, or altogether houseless, or feeding their 
herds, or dwelling in tents, amongst whom prayers 
and thanksgivings in the name of the crucified 
Jesus, are not made to the Father and Creator of 
all.” 

But, when Christ declared that, in being lifted up 


TO. CHRISTAANM FATT, 125 


from the earth, He would draw all men unto Him, 
His prediction was, unquestionably, intended to have 
not only this general reference, but also an individual 
application. It is as if He had said, “I will draw 
every man unto me, every one of the innumerable 
hosts who, in all ages and over all the earth, are to be 
my disciples, every one who shall feel in the least 
degree the pulsations of the spiritual life and yearn 
and struggle for a being above this earthly state ; 
every such an one,” says the blessed Lord, “ shall be 
drawn, by the power of the cross, unto Me.” And, 
in accordance with His words, there is indeed a proc- 
ess contantly going on, by which individuals, one 
by one, are everywhere drawn, by silent, invisible 
influences, to Christ on the cross; and are thus ena- 
bled to know Him and the power of His death, be- 
ing made comformable unto His death, that in the 
end they may attain unto the resurrection from 
_ the dead. 

Oh, yes, those of us who know anything of Christ 
know what it is to be drawn unto His cross; never 
yet has one been quickened by the very first princti- 
ples of the Christian life, except by apprehending 
Christ on the cross. Such an apprehension of Him, 
of Him crucified, is the essential principle of that 
life. There can be no true Christian experience ex- 
cept as it begins with this and continues in the ad- 
vancing realization of it. ‘The very first cravings of 
the awakened penitent find there the answer of 
peace, and the most blissful experience of the most 
saintly Christian draws thence its principles, and 
finds there its full satisfaction. 


126 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


This universal adaptability of the cross to draw to 
Christ the hearts of His children on earth, in every 
possible phase of their religious experience, is in- 
deed most wonderful. It begins to draw them even 
before they are distinctly conscious that the spiritual 
life in them has begun. While they in the world 
are laying out the plans of their life for the world, 
and giving their affections to it, then, in the risings 
of disappointment, in the secret and scarcely ad- 
mitted but real sense of unsatisfaction; in the un- 
defined and involuntary yearning after something 
higher, and truer, and better; and through all the 
circumstantial trials of their lot, through the ob- 
stacles to their coveted success, on which they are 
constantly stumbling in every path of life: through 
the dark clouds which overhang and threaten its 
through the storms which actually desolate it; in 
and through all these, they are drawn by attractive 
influences of which they are not, at first, at all con- 
scious, to the cross of Christ. They say of them- 
selves, in these dissatisfactions and disappointments, 
that they are “ crossed,’ and they express a far 
deeper truth in that saying than they are aware of. 
They are “crossed,” and, though they now know it 
not, it is, in truth, the cross of Christ, whose shadow 
has fallen upon them. If this is a part of the mys- 
tery of sin, it is also, and no less, a part of the mys- 
tery of redemption. Sin involves suffering ; yes, 
and in the unspeakable mystery of the grace of 
Christ, who is the Saviour of the world, all the suf- 
fering that is felt in the life of the world is taken up 
potentially, and may be made, in human experience, 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. P27, 


actually tributary to His own suffering on the cross. 
So, then, it is not that “blackness of darkness,” which 
is the eternal consequence of sin, that darkens the 
pathways of our earthly life; but it is the shadow of 
the Cross of Christ ; and though it seems, sometimes, 
to our poor human vision, to be very dark, yet, it is 
in truth but “a light affliction,” and designed to 
work out for us “a far more exceeding and eternal 
weight of glory.” 

Now, when the eye of faith begins to perceive 
this, then it begins to see Christ Himself; and in 
seeing Him, it is unfilmed for a far higher vision. 
It sees the meaning in relation to the end as well 
as the cause, of all human suffering. It sees the 
atonement ; sees “ God in Christ reconciling the world 
unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto 
them, but justifying them through His blood.” And 
when that is seen and apprehended with any degree 
of clearness, oh, what an attractive power is there 
then felt to be inthe Cross of Christ! How it draws 
the man; how it constrains him, as by cords of in- 
finite love, to draw close to it and to Christ upon it, 
that the precious blood flowing down from that 
pierced side, may drop upon him for his redemp- 
tion and salvation! Nor, even when all this is ef- 
fected, does the attractive power of the cross cease. 
Its effectual work is then, in truth, but just begun. 
From that moment the man not only looks unto 
Christ crucified as His atoning Saviour, but he yearns 
to be, and does in fact more and more become, in- 
corporated with Him, so that his life is not only for 
Christ, but in Christ. He becomes, and yearns to 


128 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


realize more and more that he is, a “ very member of 
His body, of His flesh and of His bones;”’ so that 
he can say with real, intelligent truth: “The life 
which I live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the 
son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for 
me;’’ and, while I live “ Christ liveth in me; I am 
crucified with Christ,” that the body of my flesh 
may be buried in Hisdeath, and raised by the power 
of His resurrection, unto His eternal life. 
So it is, then, my brethren, that the prediction of 
the text is fulfilled in every true disciple of our Lord. 
So it is that by sinful and sorrowing men, hope and 
restoration are everywhere alike found in the cruci- 
fied Redeemer. And it is indeed a most wonderful 
proof of His divinity, a marvellous demonstration of 
His divine sufficiency, that this is true. When He 
was actually lifted up on the cross there were two 
others of our human race lifted up with Him. He, 
not less than they, was crucified by the sentence of 
human law. He, more than they, was hated and 
contemned by those who procured the sentence and 
participated in the execution of it. But there has 
been no attractive power in either of those crosses. 
It would have been nothing short of blasphemous 
arrogance in either of those malefactors to have made 
for himself any such prediction as that of the text. 
Nor among all the unhappy ones, in all ages of the 
world, who have been sentenced to death and ex- 
ecuted, whether justly or unjustly by the sentence, 
is it possibly conceivable that any one could have 
made, or could adopt for himself such a declaration. 
Oh, no. He, who in thus dying could and did alone 


LO CHRISTIAN FAITH. I29 


make it, and who in all subsequent history has. veri- 
fied it, was no mere man. He was the POWER OF 
GOD AND THE WISDOM OF GOD.” He must have 
been. He was in very truth God Himself! “God 
manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of 
angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the 
world, received up into glory.” 

Let the solemn commemorative services of this 
day setting forth Christ “evidently crucified before 
our eyes,’ bring this precious gospel truth home to 
each one of us. Let the momentous practical ques- 
tion be earnestly considered by every one individ- 
ually; does the Cross of Christ have this attractive 
virtue for me? Have I been, am I being drawn by 
the Saviour, crucified thereon, unto Himself? Let 
no one dismiss this question without considering it 
well. Believe me, my brethren, this and nothing but 
this, will save you from the guilt and the misery of 
sin. You must look directly to Christ, to Christ on 
the cross, and receive the atonement there made, as 
“the full propitiation, satisfaction and oblation”’ for 
your sins. You can substitute nothing in the place 
of this; nothing in yourself ; not your own morality, 
or sincerity, or estimable qualities of any sort; not 
even your religious convictions, feelings and en- 
deavors. Nor yet is it enough to look to Christ, in 
His life on earth, for your example; if you look to 
Him no further than that you will prove to be but 
a miserably poor copyist of what even your own im- 
perfect and low apprehension sees that exampie to 
be. No, that will not do. You must not rest there. 
You must go further, and say with St. Paul: “Though 

9 


130 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now hence- 
forth know we Him no more.” You must not only 
look at Him, not only try to imitate Him, but you 
must also be found in Him, not having your own 
righteousness which is by the law, but that which is 
through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which 
is of God by faith, that you may know Him and the 
power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His 
sufferings, being made conformable unto His death, 
that so in the end you may attain unto the resurrec- 
tion of the dead. 

May He breathe upon us all His divine, quicken- 
ing and enlightening Spirit, to enable us thus to 
know Him, thus to be found in Him; and thus at 
last, through the grave and gate of death, to have 
our eternal inheritance in the blessedness of His 
heavenly life. Amen. 


TO CHRISTIAN. FAITH. I3I 


XIV. 
DERI MR I INE ION ONS a & 


Easter. 


And the graves were opened ; and many of the saints which slept 
arose, and came out of the graves after His resurrection, and went into 
the holy city, and appeared unto many.—S¢, Matt. xxvit. 52, 53. 


THE Evangelists’ narrations of the scenes and 
events connected with the Resurrection of our Lord 
are as unique, and almost as miraculous, in litera- 
ture, as the great fact itself was in actual history. 
The entire series of events, from the moment when 
the sun was darkened in His death, till the rock was 
rolled away from the door of the sepulchre in His 
rising again into life, was not only extraordinary 
and marvellous, but absolutely overwhelming to hu- 
man contemplation. And yet the Evangelists have 
recorded these occurrences in the simplest possible 
way as just matters of fact. There are no excla- 
mation marks, no notes or comments to indicate 
either doubt or astonishment on their part. No 
matter how unprecedented, how miraculous the al- 
leged fact, they put it down simply as a matter of 
record which had been certified to them by sufficient 
evidence. I say this is as unique in literature, and 
almost as miraculous as the Resurrection itself in 
actual history; and it is impossible to account for it 
on any other theory than that which has from the 
first been accepted in Christendom, viz.: that these 
Evangelists were plain, simple, matter-of-fact men, 


132 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


who, under the inspiration of the Spirit of truth, felt 
that they had no other obligation or mission in this 
respect than just to record the facts as they had re- 
ceived them; to record these facts in simple, abso- 
lute honesty; and to leave the record for study, 
investigation, explanation, meditation, to scholars, 
philosophers, sages and poets, and, at the same time, 
for inspiration to all saintly souls, whether of such 
as these or of simple and unlettered folk in all the 
after ages of the world. 

In such investigations and meditations many 
questions have been asked, and may allowably be 
asked, and among them, whether all the details of the 
narrative are to be received as absolutely certain facts, 
or only as a true record of the testimony which the 
evangelists had received. It matters not; the main 
essential fact, above all, the one great fact of the 
resurrection, is absolutely unquestionable on every 
ground of historical credibility. And, this fact being 
admitted, there is no incredibility in almost any de- 
gree of extraordinariness in the character of its acces- 
sories; nor can we doubt that there must have been 
much of confusion and bewilderment mixed with 
the consternation and amazement of the spectators 
and actors in those extraordinary scenes. 

So, when in the narrative of St. Matthew, we have 
put down asa simple matter of fact the astounding 
statement, that, in connection with our Lord’s Resur- 
rection other “graves were opened, and many bodies 
of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the 
graves and went into the holy city, and appeared 
unto many,” it matters not for us whether as a true 


710 CHRISTIAN FAITH. 133 


record, this be a statement of the facts which he 
witnessed, or, not rather of the testimony which he 
had received. In either case the mighty marvellous- 
ness of that to which it was accessory makes it credi- 
ble, and entitles it to acceptation. 

But, we have selected it for our special medita- 
tion this Easter morning for a single purpose; be- 
cause it is the first intimation we have in the New 
Testament of one of the effects of our Lord’s resur- 
rection in the realm of human thought and feeling, 
viz.: the change which it made in the minds of His 
disciples as they thought of the dead and contem- 
plated their state. The Evangelist says here, “ many 
bodies of the saints whzch slept, arose.” ‘ Saints 
which slept.” Observe how naturally and involun- 
tarily he speaks of the dead as having been only 
asleep. And this is the first indication of what we 
know to be the fact, that this became very soon the 
common conception of death among Christian be- 
lievers. Again and again throughout the New Testa- 
ment the departed are so spoken of; and throughout 
Christendom, from the earliest age the commonly 
accepted name for the burial grounds of the dead 
has been that of a “cemetery ;” which means simply 
2 sleeping place. 

A fit subject for grateful meditation on Easter 
morning, then, may be this: to consider some of 
the obvious reasons why we, who have life and im- 
mortality brought to light in the Resurrection of 
Christ, should thus speak and think of those whom 
the world calls dead. The first and most obvious of 
these is, because we know, as the world before or 


134 THE ALINE SSOP GAD EMCITORCE 


without the knowledge of the Resurrection of Christ 
could not know, the limited power of death. 

Without revelation death seems to be destruc- 
tion. And even the arguments of reason, which tell 
us of the immortality of the soul, the imperishable 
permanence of character, or even the indestructi- 
bility of matter, are confronted by the stern facts 
of dissolution, which meet inevitably the sentence: 
‘“ Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” But 
in the light of the revelation of the Gospel of 
Christ, we know that death is not final, and that it 
has no power to destroy the vital principle in either 
the soul or the body. We know that the grave is 
but a cemetery—a sleeping place for the mortal 
frame, and that in Paradise there is blissful rest for 
the redeemed soul till the Resurrection Day. There- 
fore, we may properly think and speak of death as 
but asleep. Not, indeed, as some have coldly sup- 
posed, as a state of insensibility and unconscious- 
ness; for sleep does not necessarily involve uncon- 
sciousness. We seldom remember on waking what 
have been the themes which have occupied our 
thoughts during the sleeping hours; but there is no 
doubt that the mind has both retained and exer- 
cised its thinking faculties. What is even more to 
the purpose, it often proves itself, in the free and 
spontaneous exercise of its capabilities which it 
has in the favored seclusion of the sleeping state, to 
be possessed of powers of intellect and imagina- 
tion, of which there are no gleams in the awakened 
consciousness. “ No Raphael can paint a dew-drop 
or a flake of frost. Yet some rude man, tired of his 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 135 


work, lies down beneath a tree, his head upon his 
swarthy arm; sleep shuts one by one those five 
scant portals of the soul—and what an artist ts he 
made at once! Wow brave a sky he paints above 
him! With what golden garniture of clouds set off! 
What flowers and trees, what men and women does 
he not create, and moving in celestial scenes! What 
years of history does he condense in one short 
minute!” And yet, “when he wakes, he shakes off 
the purple drapery of his dream, as if it were 
but worthless dust, and girds him for his work 
anew.” * | 

So, we doubt not, in the sleep of the faithful de- 
parted, there are visions of blessedness infinitely 
surpassing the most rapturous conceptions of bliss 
that are ever attained to in our earthly state. Their 
rest is, surely “not the rest of a stone—cold and 
lifeless; but of wearied humanity,” alive unto God, 
and in the nursing care of His unsleeping and in- 
finitely tender love. They are “asleep in Jesus;”’ 
and, we doubt not, they see His face and feel the 
beating of His loving heart. This is quite consistent 
with the fact, that, until the Resurrection Day, when 
the restoration of the body shall complete their 
identity, and give them back, fully redeemed, all 
their original powers of active energy, they must be 
in some real sense analogous to the condition of the 
body when asleep, in an imperfect and quiescent 
state, rather than in active service. The souls of 
the waiting martyrs are represented in the Book of 


* I am indebted for this striking illustration to Theo. Parker’s 
Sermon of Immortality. O sz ste omnia. 


136 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


Revelation as being, not in the full enjoyment of 
heavenly blessedness, nor before the throne of God, 
but as being “under the altar;” seeming to inti- 
mate that they are in a safe and holy treasure house 
close by, “in acleft of the rock,’ as Moses was, 
covered by the hand of God, and beholding the 
skirts of His glory; in that intermediate state which 
is called Paradise, the Garden of the Lord, where . 
His voice may be heard and the light of His coun- 
tenance enjoyed; but which is still not the place 
where His highest glory is perpetually manifested. 
That is reserved for the final reward, when all the 
righteous shall have been gathered in after the 
Resurrection Day. 

But, even in the intermediate state, and while they 
are thus “asleep in Jesus,” we may, I think, without 
presumption, indulge the hope and even cherish the 
belief that they still, at least with all the affections 
of spiritual affinity, remember us. “How much of 
all that they were must they forfeit, if they lose 
both memory and love. Shall we think that we can 
remember Bethel, and Gideon, and the valley of 
Ajalon, and Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives; 
but that Jacob, and Joshua, and David, and the be- 
loved disciple remember them not? Or shall the 
lifeless dust that their feet stood upon be re- 
membered, and the living spirits who there dwell 
with them, be clean forgotten? Surely we may be- 
lieve that they who live unto God, live in the un- 
folded sameness of personal identity, replenished 
with charity, and filled with a holy light; reaching 
backward in spirit into this world of warfare, and 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 137, 


onward in blissful expectation to the day of Christ’s 
coming, and in that holy waiting adore, as the 
brightness of Paradise ever waxes unto the perfect 
day, when the noontide of God’s kingdom ‘shall be 
as the light of seven days,’ and shall stand forever 
in a meridian splendor. He hath made His rest to 
be glorious; and there is He gathering in His jewels. 
There is the multitude of saints, waiting and wor- 
shipping. Abel is there, and Isaiah, and Rachel who 
would not be comforted, and the sonless widow, and 
Mary Magdalene, and all martyrs, and all the holy 
ones of God. They wore out with patience the 
years of this toilsome life; and they are resting now. 
They sleep in Jesus. Theirs is a bliss only less 
perfect than the glory of His kingdom when the 
new creation shall be accomplished.” * 

And so we have already indicated to us another 
reason why we should think of them, not as dead, 
but as asleep, viz.: because we know that they shalt 
wake up again. “Our friend Lazarus sleepeth, but 
I go that I may awake him out of sleep.”’ That ut- 
terance of the Son of God on earth in regard to one 
whom He loved has become, since His resurrection 
and ascension, the universal promise of His Gospel; 
assuring a certain, ultimate triumph over death and 
the grave to all who are “departed in the true 
faith of His holy name.” Therefore, death has 
become, in relation to the resurrection, simply what 
sleep is to waking. “It is only a prelude; a 
transitory state ushering in a mightier power of 
lifes: 


* Manning’s Sermons, vol. I. p. 247. 


138 LAE WITNESS POL VLE” CHURCH 


How incomparably below our favored position in 
this respect was that of even the most clear sighted 
and spiritually minded cf the old heathen sages? 
They mused and boded and felt after immortality as 
they felt after God; but, after all, death and the 
world of the dead was to them a dreary night. They 
saw men going down into the dust, but they saw 
none come back again; they had heard not even a 
whisper of the Resurrection of the body. If the dis- 
embodied spirit should live on, that was the highest 
attainment of their hope; and even this was clouded 
and dim. And so, the fleetingness of life and the un- 
known condition of the dead were the chosen themes, 
alike of their deepest philosophy and their highest 
strains of poetry. And even the elect people of God, 
in the old dispensations, were permitted to see but 
very dimly the coming gleams of the Resurrection. 
“Death was too high, too mighty, and too absolute; 
they saw and felt his dominion. Of his ultimate 
overthrow they had indeed both the promise and 
the prophecy; but as yet he seemed too tyran- 
nously strong to pass away into a transitory 
sleep.” 

Ah! but it is ours to sing a new song. “I heard 
a voice from Heaven”; from Heaven—no longer an 
unknown realm, but the place whither our Saviour 
Christ, who is “the Resurrection and the Life,” hath — 
“gone before ’—‘‘ saying unto me, Write, Blessed 
are the dead who die in the Lord from henceforth; 
even so, saith the Spirit, for they rest from their la- 
bors.” Therefore, for us, death is not only doomed 
to final extinction, but is even now destroyed, and 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 139 


“ Life and Immortality ” are already, in the reality 
of fact as well as the assurance of promise, “‘ brought 
to light.” Our dead shall live again; nay, they are 
not dead, even now; they are but sleeping, in that 
kindly, soothing rest which is needful for the wearied 
and world-worn spirit; and in due time we know | 
that they shall hear the voice of Him in whom they 
have trusted, and shall wake up in His likeness and 
be satisfied. 

For these reasons, then, and surely they are quite 
sufficient, the death of the righteous is truly spoken 
of as a sleep, and may be rightly regarded by us as 
both the pledge of present rest and the prophecy of 
a certain future resurrection. We say the death of 
the righteous, the death of those who fall asleep in 
Jesus; for it is only of these that the Scriptures 
speak when they use this language. They do, in- 
deed, in dark hints refer to the death of the wicked. 
They speak of souls “in darkness,” “shut out from 
the presence of the Lord and the glory of His 
power;” they warn us that the bad as well as the 
good will be raised up and judged in the last day; 
and we know in how fearful terms are portrayed the 
everlasting condition of such as shall then be con- 
demned. But the text speaks only of those who 
sleep in Jesus; and of such only have we been speak- 
ing now. It is the privilege of all of us, if we will, 
to be in Jesus; and enough, therefore, is it for us to 
know that they. who are in Him, when they pass 
away from this mortal life, enter into a state of 
blissful rest. 

This, thank God, we do know. It is not a guess; 


T40 LHE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


not a supposition or probable opinion; but it is the 
positive, explicit assurance of the revelation of Christ 
our Lord. 

As one, then, and that not the least precious 
among the many precious gleams of revelation from 
the Easter sun, let this consoling and cheering as- 
surance be taken to our hearts. Weep not for the 
sainted ones whom God hath taken. They are at 
rest. They sleep in Jesus; and no harm can happen 
unto them. Seek not, either with devotees of old 
superstition or modern infidels, to pass the barrier 
which separates them now from the apprehensions 
of sense. Fancy not, with the old heathens, that 
their spirits are left to wander up and down in in- 
visible space, or that they are any longer subject to 
the disturbances of our earthly state. But leave them 
in faith and hope with Christ: and rejoice in believ- 
ing that, as He is the Living Head both of them and 
of us, through Him alone we may commune with 
them now, and with Him we shall all together at 
last be raised up to stand before the throne of God. 


‘They are at rest 
We may not stir the haven of their repose 
By rude invoking voice, or prayer addrest 
In waywardness to those 
Who in the mountain grots of Eden lie, 
And hear the fourfold river as it murmurs by. 


‘* They hear it sweep 
In distance down the dark and savage vale ; 
But they at rocky bed, or current deep, 
Shall nevermore grow pale ; 
They hear, and meekly muse, as fain to know 
How long untired, unspent, that giant stream shall flow. 


TO CHRISTIAN: FALE, I4!I 


‘* And soothing sounds 
Blend with the neighboring waters as they glide, 
Posted along the haunted garden’s bounds 
Angelic forms abide, 
Echoing, as words of watch, o’er lawn and grove, 
The verses of that hymn which seraphs chant above.” 


142 LHE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


eV 5 
LASTER FAITH. 


Gaster. 


“‘And when they heard of the Resurrection of the dead, some 
mocked ; and others said, we will hear thee again of this matter.”— 
A cls 211-632. 


% 


ST. PAUL, having been directed by the Holy 
Ghost to preach the Gospel in Macedonia, was 
subjected to three successive persecutions, in Phil- 
ippi, Thessalonica, and Berea; from the last of 
which he was rescued by certain of the brethren 
and conveyed in safety to Athens. There he sent 
word to his companions, Silas and Timotheus, to 
join him; and while waiting, “his spirit was stirred 
within him when he saw the city wholly given 
to idolatry,” or, as it is in the margin, “full of idols.” 
He therefore engaged in disputations, “in the syn- 
agogue with the Jews, and with the devout persons, 
and in the market daily with them that met him.” 
He encountered also certain philosophers of the 
Epicureans, who counted it but superstition to live 
for anything but present enjoyment; and of the 
Stoics, to whom all the events and issues of life 
were the inevitable impositions of arbitrary fate. 
At last he was brought unto Areopagus ; probably 
as the most convenient place for addressing the 
multitude; perhaps to submit his doctrines to the 
test of the judicial tribunal which was there in 
session. And, standing on Mar’s Hill—in the very 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 143 


heart of Athens, with its statues, and altars, and 
temples of many deities around him—the Apostle 
found a most fit opportunity to proclaim his testi- 
mony against idolatry, and to announce himself as 
an ambassador of the One, Living and True God. 
Having observed, as he passed through one of the 
streets of the city, an altar with this inscription: 
“To the Unknown God,” he took this as a text or 
motto on which to hinge the argument of his dis- 
course. He announced that he had come to make 
that God known to them; and declaring Him to be 
the Creator and preserver of all things, he exhorted 
them to turn from their idols and worship Him 
alone, by this argument: “ Forasmuch as we are all 
the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the 
Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven 
by art and man’s device. And the times of this ig- 
norance God winked at; but now commandeth all 
men everywhere to repent; because He hath ap- 
pointed a day, in the which He will judge the world 
in righteousness by that man whom He hath or- 
dained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all 
men, in that He hath raised him from the dead.”’ 

Up to this point the assembled multitude listened 
to him patiently and, no doubt, with the eager curi- 
osity for which the Athenians were distinguished. 
But “when they heard of the Resurrection from the 
dead, some mocked; and others said, we will hear 
thee again on this matter.” 

It is plain from this that the doctrine of the resur- 
rection of the dead, which St. Paul preached, was 
entirely new to the Athenians. And let us not fail 


I44 LHE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


to note the significance of this fact. Athens, we 
know, was the seat of the Grecian philosophy. The 
Athenians were not unaccustomed to speculations, 
or unfamiliar with theories concerning the future 
life. Quite the contrary, the subject was a very old 
and familiar one in their thoughts. And if the 
Apostle had entered into an argument for the pos- 
sibility of a future existence, or for its probability, 
from moral considerations, or spiritual intuitions; had 
he put his doctrine on any philosophical or even re- 
ligious ground, as that of the immortality of the soul, 
there would have been nothing in it that would have 
startled the Athenians, or occasioned among them 
the least surprise. Even if he had gone much farther, 
and argued for the possibility of a future life for the 
body, as well as the soul ; this, though it had not been 
distinctly formulated, might have been not unreason- 
ably grounded on the principle, which was very gen- 
erally accepted in their philosophy, of the indestructi- 
bility of matter; and would not have stirred them up, 
as the Apostle’s preaching plainly did, to interrupting 
opposition. No, the truth clearly is, that what the 
Apostle declared in their ears, was, no speculation, 
no theory, no mere doctrine; but it was, and was 
claimed to be, fact. God had, to his personal 
knowledge, raised up one from the dead, and thereby 
had given assurance unto all men of a like resur- 
rection, and an eternal judgment by him. This was 
the Resurrection which the Apostle proclaimed ; and 
nothing short of, or in any respect other than, this, 
can ever be truly preached or held as the Christian 
doctrine of “the Resurrection of the dead.” 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 145 


For us, as for St. Paul, the Resurrection of Christ 
brings the future Resurrection of all men wethzn the 
domain of fact; and this is the ground of our un- 
questioning faith init as Christians. We are assured 
that we shall rise from the dead and live everlastingly, 
because He hath risen in the power of an endless life. 
Now, on this basis of fact, we have the assurance, in 
the first place, that we shall be the same identical 
beings in the future life that we are now. The old 
Athenians were familiar enough with speculations 
concerning the future state of existence, but their 
boldest speculations always fell short of the grasp of 
this truth. In the great poem, which they were all 
accustomed to consider as the foundation of their 
literature and their religion alike, the departed 
heroes are represented as existing after death only 
as ghostly shades. They have a form; but it is an 
unsubstantial form, which eludes the grasp. The 
body has fallen to dust; the spirit also has perished ; 
the soul alone still exists; but it lives a cold, sad, 
gloomy, dream-like life, mindful of its former pur- 
suits, but no longer able to enjoy them. “ Such is 
the lot of mortals,” exclaims the mother of Ulysses. 
“When they die, the muscles no longer hold to- 
gether the flesh and bones, but they perish in the fire 
when the breath leaves the body, and the soul flits 
hither and thither like adream.” A later philosophy 
held, that in the future our personal identity, and 
with it our personal consciousness, will be altogether 
lost; that our souls will exist indeed, but exist only 
as the vital principle in birds or beasts or creeping 


things, or even in trees or plants. While still 
Io 


146 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


another, and that by far the highest, could dare to 
assert but this as a positive conviction that “there 
is in man a principle that cannot perish.” But that 
this principle will re-appear in another world, with 
the same order of faculties and under the same laws 
that pertain to its being here, was not conceived of 
as true or probable. 

Here, then, was the new thing in St. Paul’s an- 
nouncement of the Resurrection of Jesus. It was no 
abstraction of a possible immortality ; but it was the 
assertion of a veritable, literal Resurrection. A man 
had died and risen again; had risen again so as to be 
the same identical person that he was before; not a 
mere vital principle, not a mere disembodied, though 
conscious, soul, but a complete man, body, soul and 
spirit; all in true, organic union, and fulfilling the 
essential functions of a true, glorified, and perfected 
manhood. 

Such, then, is the Christian conception; nay, not 
the conception only, but the well-grounded assur- 
ance of the future life. We shall rise again, as Christ 
rose, in the completeness of nature and identity; 
and the life hereafter shall be a true continuation, in 
legitimate development, of the life which we are 
living now. And, with our personal identity and 
therein the continuance of our personal conscious- 
ness, we may, surely, believe also that there will be 
to us still the grounds, and within us the capacities 
for identical recognitions and affections. Christ not 
only knew and recognized His disciples after His 
Resurrection, but assured them that they would be 
admitted into heavenly companionship with Him, 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 147 


after His final and eternal triumph over death and 
hell. And if it was to be their joy that they should 
be with Him, this, surely, could not be without 
knowing Him, nor without knowing and rejoicing 
together with each other, and with all others alike 
redeemed and saved in Him. 

These are the two essential points in the Christian 
doctrine of the Resurrection; the completeness of 
our personal identity, and the perfection of our con- 
sciousness in the future life. In holding these we 
have the assurance of a well-grounded faith. 

This faith is not only self-consistent, but it is the 
only faith which takes in the essential conditions and 
realizes the full capabilities of our human nature. It 
recognizes our whole existence from its germinal 
beginning to its fullest development in the most re- 
mote eternity, as continuously and legitimately but 
one. Weare men, spirit, soul and body, upon earth; 
we shall be men, spirit, soul and body, in the world 
to come. We are not to be human existences here, 
and spiritual existences there; but human existences 
in both; “and our life shall know no break from its 
first dim dawn to its mid-day brightness in the world 
of bliss. When we stand before God, in presence of 
the great white throne, and are judged every man 
according to his works, it shall not be possible for 
any one to say that the body in which he stands is 
a strange, untried one, in which on earth he never 
sinned or repented, and on which it is unjust that 
punishment shonld now fall, and unbefitting that 
glory should come. All transformed though it shall 
be, the possessor of each body will feel that it is his 


148 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


own ‘once sweet flesh.’ It will gather round our 
spirits as a natural garment. The judgment which 
is given on the deeds done in the body, however 
woful, will be felt to descend on the very body in 
which the deeds were done. The tears which God 
shall, once for all, wipe away from the faces of the 
blessed, shall assuage the weeping of the very eyes, 
wonderfully changed, but felt to be the same, that 
wept day and night upon earth; and the conscious- 
ness that it shall never know pain again, shall thrill 
through the very frame that once agonized in the 
mortal life, like the ripple on a lake, which though 
now serene as the clear sky above it, has in it tokens 
that it fell from heaven, and has carried with it signs 
of the battles with the rocks over which it was flung, 
and the whirlpools in which it wrestled before it 
reached the landlocked valley below.” * 

But let us ever keep our faith in this great Chris- 
tian doctrine clear of speculations concerning its 
physical conditions. Let us remember that even 
an Apostle, in the fulness of inspiration, was con- 
strained to say that “it doth not yet appear ”—it is 
not yet made manifest to our senses or our intel- 
lectual conception—“ what we shall be.” The body 
with which we shall be clothed upon, will indeed, in 
all that is essential to its identity, be the same with 
that body which is to each one of us an essential 
part of himself ; but who of us can now tell precisely 
what it is that constitutes essential identity ? Most 
certainly not anything that is the product of pres- 
ent physical defect, derangement, or infirmity. This 


* Religio Chemici, by Dr. George Wilson, p. 375. 


PO CHRISTIANE FATEH, 149 


is very clear, because our personality in the future 
life is to be a perfect personality. There shall be 
no pain or sickness, no diseased or defective mem- 
bers when death shall have been conquered, and our 
mortal bodies shall have become immortal in the 
glory of the risen life. 

Nor again, does the identity of the body depend 
on the identity of its present material particles. 
These are constantly changing throughout the life 
that now is. The body of our childhood is not, in 
this respect, the body of our youth, nor the body of 
our youth that of our manhood, nor the body of our 
manhood that of our old age. In the material par- 
ticles of which it is composed, and indeed in all its 
material qualities and conditions, it is, from first to 
last, in a continual process of change ; and yet, from 
first to last it is nevertheless true that it remains 
ever the same body, as the person to whom it be- 
longs is the same person. Enough, then, that inthe 
Resurrection we shall still, each one, be consciously 
and fully himself, and not another. Enough that, 
with this perfection of consciousness, we shall awake 
from the grave and sleep of death, and in waking 
shall feel the mortal to have put on immortality, 
and the corruption to have put on incorruption. 
How, in the developing power of that endless life 
we shall be changed, we do not know. “It doth 
not yet appear,” nor to our present limited faculties 
can it appear, “what we shall be.” This only we 
know, and this we do know assuredly, for we have 
the word of God Himself for it, that “if the Spirit of 
Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in 


150 LHE WITINESS OF THE CHURCH 


us, He that hath raised up Christ from the dead 
shall also quicken our mortal body by His Spirit 
that dwelleth in us,” and that we shall then be in 
all respects “like Him.” Our vile bodies shall be 
changed and made like unto His glorious body, our 
souls shall live, with all their faculties quickened and 
all their affections sanctified by His own divine 
Spirit, and even the atmosphere in which we shall 
live, move, and have our being, will be nothing else 
than the very breath of His eternal life. 

Knowing this, we need not desire to know more. 
We do, indeed, most thankfully accept the illustra- 
tions of the heavenly state which are given to us in 
the inspired volume, and we know assuredly that 
when we have gathered together all its descriptions 
and all its images, and have invested them with the 
fullest and highest significance which our imagina- 
tion can grasp, we have yet but a faint conception of 
the glory of that state; but, after all, this, ¢izs isthe 
ground of our brightest, and highest, and purest 
hope, that in Heaven we shall live, in all its infinite 
and eternal fulness, THE LIFE OF GOD, even as that 
Life is possessed by our Elder Brother, His only 
and well beloved Son, Jesus Christ. 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. I5I 


XVI. 
THE CARNAL TEMPER FAITHLESS. 


Easter-tide. 


What, and if ye shall sce the Son of Man ascend up where he 
was before ?— St. John, vi. 62. 


“ FARD SAYINGS” in religion are very apt to be in 
the way of those persons whose affections and habits 
are determined chiefly by the gratifications and ad- 
vantages of the present life. Such were those to 
whom this question was put by our Lord. They 
had followed Him from Tiberias to Capernaum and 
avowed themselves His disciples ; but they were in- 
duced to put themselves in this relation to Him not 
by a true religious belief that He was “ the Lamb of 
God, which taketh away the sins of the world,” nor 
yet by a sincere desire for the knowledge which they 
might get from His instructions, but because they 
had, on the day before, been plentifully supplied 
with food through His miraculous power. 

Such disciples received no encouragement from 
Him. He saw their carnal motives, though it ts 
quite probable that they were not conscious of them ; 
and when they came to Him with expressions of af- 
fectionate anxiety, He replied, “ Verily, verily, I say 
unto you, ye seek Me, not because ye saw the mira- 
cles,”—not, that is, because ye believe My works, 
and therefore believe in Me—“ but because ye did 
eat of the loaves and were filled.’ He then goes on 
to rebuke their unworthy motives and to teach them 


152 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


that it was no part of His religion to pander to such 
motives. His object was infinitely higher; He came 
to feed the souls, not the bodies of men, and there- 
fore He required His disciples to “labor not for the 
meat which perisheth, but for that meat which en- 
dureth unto everlasting life.” This, if they earn- 
estly desired it, He would give them. For He was 
the “ Bread of God, which came down from Heaven, 
and giveth life to the world.” Whosoever should 
come sincerely unto Him should never hunger, and 
the believer in Him should never thirst. 

It is no wonder that, with their carnal notions, 
they were unable to comprehend this. It is no 
wonder that they murmured at Him because He 
said, “I am the Bread which came down from 
Heaven.” It is no wonder that they doubted and 
questioned: “Is not this Jesus, whose father and 
mother we know; how is it then that He saithel 
came down from Heaven?” 

But, on the other hand, it is no wonder that the 
only answer which our Lord would give to such cav- 
illings was the reiteration, in still stronger terms, of 
His former assertions: “ Verily, verily, I say unto 
you, he that believeth on Me hath everlasting life. 
I am the Bread of Life. Your fathers did eat manna 
in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the Bread 
which cometh down from Heaven that a man may 
eat thereof, and not die. I am the living Bread 
which came down from Heaven. If any man eat of 
this Bread he shall live forever. And the Bread that 
I will give is My flesh which I will give for the life of 
the world.” 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH, 153 


Now, note the influence of carnal notions and de- 
sires. One would suppose that these declarations 
of Christ were sufficiently explicit. One would sup- 
pose that after a miracle so evidently divine as that 
of creating instantaneously food for thousands, there 
would have been no difficulty in perceiving that He 
must have been a Divine Person, and, if Divine, that 
His teachings must not be interpreted in a gross 
and carnal sense. But gross and carnal minds 
are incapable of apprehending any other sense. 
And, therefore, they stumbled into new difficulties. 
“ How can this man’’—this son of Joseph—“ give 
us His flesh to eat?” They were difficulties, how- 
ever, of their own raising, springing from their own 
sensual imaginations; and, therefore, our Lord would 
not condescend to answer them. On the contrary, 
He repeated, in yet more startling language, “ Ver- 
ily, verily, I say unto you, except ye eat the flesh 
of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no 
life in you. . . . He that eateth My flesh and 
drinketh my blood dwellethin Me,andI inhim. As 
the Father hath sent Me, and I live by the Father, 
so he that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me.” 

This was “a hard saying.” And not only these 
Jews who had hitherto stumbled at His declara-_ 
tions, but many of His disciples also, when they 
heard this, murmured at Him, saying, “ Who can 
hear it?’ Who can understand and believe a doc- 
trine so monstrous and incredible? 

It was then that our Lord put the question in the 
text: “Doth this offend you? What, and if ye shall 
see the Son of Manascend up where He was before?” 


154 LHL WHINE SSO) Te foe COR CA. 


As if He had said, “ Would you then rise above 
these carnal conceptions and understand what is 
meant by “the Bread coming down from Heaven to 
be the life of the world? Or, would you then be- 
lieve that I came down from Heaven, notwithstand- 
ing your knowledge of My earthly parentage?” He 
added also, for them and for us, “ It is the Spirit that 
quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing. The words 
that I speak unto you, they are Spirit and they are 
Isifers 

My brethren, I have entered into this detailed ac- 
count of our Lord’s teaching in this chapter not for 
the purpose of explaining away what, most assuredly, 
He did not explain away, nor yet for the purpose 
of attempting to reconcile with carnal conceptions 
what He proposed, plainly, in opposition to such 
conceptions, but rather to raise, as He would raise, 
our minds above such conceptions. 

It zs mysterious, incomprehensibly mysterious, 
that He who was born to all earthly appearance of 
human parents, should have come down from heaven; 
it is mysterious that His body and His blood should 
be given for the life of the world. 

But what then? Shall we deny it because we 
cannot comprehend it? Shall we refuse to believe 
on Him, and decline to accept this Food at His hands, 
because we cannot comprehend by what process it 
will nourish us unto eternal life? Or, generally, 
shall we neglect our spiritual obligations and be 
false to our spiritual relations, because of some pre- 
sumed difficulty in the system of faith and obedience 
which is revealed from Heaven for our salvation? 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 155 


No mistake is more common than this. It was 
not in our Lord’s day only, but in every day ever 
since, that men refuse to follow Christ, or, after be- 
ginning, turn back from following Him, because they 
find difficulties in His appointed way of salvation 
which do not square with their carnal conceptions. 
These conceptions appear to them to be very reason- 
able. They are, as they say, common-sense concep- 
tions; they are founded on plain, rational principles. 
And are these, they ask, to be givenup? Are we 
to extinguish the light of reason which God hath lit 
within us? Are we to take things upon trust? Are 
we to sell our substantial birthright for castles in 
the skies? Are we to leave the firm rock of expe- 
rience to travel blindfold in unexplored regions? 
Are we to run on, neglecting the things that are 
seen and reaching after those things that are un- 
seen? 

Precisely so reasoned the Jews in our Lord’s day. 
It was perfectly plain to them, as plain as anything 
could be, that He was the son of Joseph and Mary, 
whom they well knew. Being such, it was as plain 
that He did not come down from Heaven, and still 
more plain, if possible, that He could not give them 
His flesh to eat; or, if so monstrous an idea could be 
harbored, that His flesh would have no efficacy to 
preserve them from death and sustain them in 
eternal life. 

Now this reasoning was perfectly sound and logi- 
cal as far asit went. And yet it did not lead to the 
truth. For we know that our Lord did come down 
from Heaven, and, praised be His name, we know also 


156 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


that His body was given to be the Life of the world. 
Where, then, was the difficulty? How was it that 
inferences so fairly drawn from well-known facts led 
to conclusions so far from the truth? 

The answer to them and to all who think and act 
like them is this: The reasoning was altogether one- 
sided. It was based on truth; but not onthe whole 
truth. Its premises were, in fact, only just so much 
of the truth—the small and comparatively unim- 
portant part of it—which is obvious to a mind that 
is exercised wholly in the material considerations of 
the present life. It was true that the name of Jesus 
appeared on the Jewish records as the sonof Joseph 
and Mary ; true that in the contemporaneous history 
He had been well known as such to many of the Jews 
who were now around Him. 

But then it was also true that from the beginning 
of the world spiritually minded men had been yearn- 
ing for such a Teacher and Saviour as He, that the 
oracles of God, with which the Jews had been for 
ages intrusted, and in which they were taught to 
look for the words of eternal life, were full of proph- 
ecies and types predictive of Him; and that, not- 
withstanding the lowliness of His earthly parentage 
He was in truth the Incarnate Son of God, born, not 
through ordinary human generation, but of pure 
Virgin maternity overshadowed by the Holy Ghost. 
Moreover, it was also true that both His teachings 
and His works were superhuman. He spake as never 
man spake, and wrought miracles, for which no 
human energy was competent, but which must have 
been wrought by the mighty power of God. 


tOMCHRISTIAN FAITH, 157 


On the principles of religion, therefore, as they had 
been revealed to and accredited by the Jews them- 
selves, Jesus was entitled to implicit confidence when 
He declared that He had come down from Heaven 
and that His Body was the Life of the world. All 
the difficulty which the Jews found in receiving this 
assertion on His teaching throughout this chapter 
was attributable simply to the fact that their habitual 
thoughts and desires were altogether carnal. There- 
fore they fixed their minds wholly on the facts which 
were cognizable by the physical senses or appreciable 
on the ordinary conditions of human estimation, and 
overlooked all that was extraordinary and disregarded 
all that was supernatural. With minds and hearts 
so disposed it is no wonder that they disputed His 
claims and deemed His doctrines incredible. 

Is it not precisely so in our day, brethren? Do 
not the difficulties which men commonly find now in 
the scheme of revelation arise from their imperfect 
conceptions and their partial apprehension of its 
truths? Do they not fix their minds habitually on 
the ordinary and common-place, and draw thence 
their inferences and conclusions? Do they not for- 
get that God’s thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor 
His ways as our ways? Do they not forget that 
His power is infinite and His wisdom eternal ? 

To illustrate this by particular instances. Why isit 
that men, and they even in many cases like those in 
the chapter before us, among the professed disciples 
of Christ, find a difficulty in admitting that there can 
be any grace in the holy sacraments which were con- 
fessedly ordained by Him to be the signs and seals 


158 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


of participation in the covenant conditions of salva- 
tion? Why is it that they reason among themselves 
and say, how is it possible for the application of a 
little water to the body to have any connection with 
the cleansing of the soul from sin? And how is it 
possible for the reception of a little bread and wine 
to be in any way efficacious towards nourishing grace 
in the soul or towards the strengthening of it for an 
eternal existence? 

Men do ask these questions. And because they 
cannot answer them, thousands are content to run 
the risk of living and dying in utter neglect of the 
divinely appointed means of grace. 

It may be that some whom I am now addressing 
are living in this manner and upon this principle. If 
so, I beseech them to consider whether they are not 
attempting to measure the infinite by the finite; 
whether they are not walking by sight rather than 
by faith; whether they are not limiting the power 
of God by the weakness of man? 

It is unquestionably true that there is in the ele- 
ment of water no inherent efficacy to wash out the 
stains of the soul; it is true that there is in the ele- 
ments of bread and wine no inherent efficacy to 
nourish spiritual life. But, what if inthe sacramental 
administration of these elements under conditions 
and for purposes which are all divinely ordained, the 
Almighty Creator and Saviour hath imparted this 
efficacious power? What if the Heavenly Dove 
hovers over that sacramental water to render it 
“the Washing of Regeneration ” and the sign and seal 
of the New Birth? What if the bread which we 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. I59 


break is the communion of the Body of Christ and 
the cup which we bless is the communion of the 
Blood of Christ ? I am not saying now that it is so. 
But I put to you whether the Word of God does not 
so declare; and if that be so, whether in raising ob- 
jections and resting in doubts your reasoning and 
your conduct are not precisely like those of the 
Jews? 

So with all the other difficulties which people 
commonly find in revelation. They deny the doc- 
trine of the Incarnation, because they cannot under- 
stand how God and man could be united in one 
person. They deny the doctrine of the Atonement, 
because they see no need of such an interposition, 
and because it does not accord with their notions of 
the divine nature or attributes. They deny the doc- 
trine of Future Retribution because it is not consis- 
tent with their ideas of the Divine mercy. They 
deny the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, because they 
cannot comprehend how three Persons should each 
possess all the attributes of God and that there 
should yet be but one God. 

Now, it is not our present purpose to prove, or 
even to assert, that these doctrines are true; but 
simply to ask whether the Scriptures which have 
come to us as the Word of God do not teach us that 
they are true; and if so, whether those who reject 
them are not acting precisely like the Jews, who did 
not believe that Christ came down from Heaven, or 
that His flesh could be the Life of the world. 

And then, I would put to such doubters the 
question which our Lord Himself put to the Jews: 


160 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


“What and if ye shall see the Son of Man ascend 
up, where He was before?” What and if future dem- 
onstrations of the power and wisdom of God shall 
prove the truth of His word and the fallacy of their 
reasonings? Our Lord did ascend up into Heaven, 
and His Body was given for the Life of the world. 
And those who are disposed now to doubt any of His 
declarations because they find difficulties in them 
irreconcilable with their present knowledge, should 
consider very seriously whether the imperfection of 
their knowledge may not be attributed to the 
earthliness of their apprehensions ; and if so, whether 
it is not the part of wisdom and of duty to submit 
their reason to God’s Word, to receive implicitly 
that word, incomprehensible though it be, and 
to rely on His assurance that in His own time and 
way it will be veritably demonstrated,—that though 
they are permitted now to see only as through a 
glass, darkly, the time will come when they shall be 
permitted to see face to face. While, on the other 
hand, if they refuse to believe God’s Word, the time 
may come when with the overwhelming demonstra- 
tion of its truth, there shall be no escape from the 
sentence—‘“ Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and 
perish !” 

Let us not fail to note that while many, in the 
chapter before us, turned away from Christ with the 
murmuring complaint of His teachings—* This is a 
hard saying, who can hear it?”’—there were others 
who clung to Him the more faithfully, saying, 
“Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words 
of eternal life.” And let us remember and lay to 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 161 


heart the end of these men. Oh, who would not 
rather have been, at the last, with the confiding, sim- 
ple-minded disciples, than with the doubting and 
disbelieving Jews? Who would not rather have been 
with the Saviour at Bethany and received His 
parting blessing as He went up to His throne of 
heavenly glory, than with those, who, having become 
offended and forsaken Him, were now to be num- 
ered among His enemies, and made to feel the rod 
of His power? 

Let us, then, profit by their example. Let us 
receive, with implicit confidence, all that God has 
been pleased to reveal. Where we cannot compre- 
hend, let us adore; where reason staggers, let faith 
be strong. 

It 


162 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


XVII. 
THE ASCENDED LORD. 


Ascension Man. 


Now, of the things which we have spoken, this is the sum: We 
have such a High Priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne 
of the majesty in the heavens ; a minister of the Sanctuary and of the 
True Tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man.—/Hed. vit. 
12; 

CHRISTIAN belief is not a set of notions, opinions 
or sentiments, but simply a credence of actual 
facts—the facts in the life and revelation of Jesus 
Christ; which facts are real, whether we believe 
them or no; only, our belief puts us in a true rela- 
tion towards Him and towardsGod. Believing that 
He isthe only begotten Son of the Father, Who 
came from Heaven to redeem us from the curse of 
sin, we commit ourselves with implicit trust unto 
Him as our all-sufficient Saviour, and look up unto 
God as our all-merciful Father. And there is no fact 
in the life of Jesus, nothing of all that He said or did, 
that faith passes by; no word, or deed, or manifes- 
tation of Himself, that it does not accredit and em- 
brace with the homage of its most implicit trust and 
its deepest gratitude. 

But the facts on which faith is thus grounded are 
not mere facts of the past. The life:and works of 
Jesus did not cease with His death, 1800 years ago ; 
He died then in the flesh, as it is appointed unto all 
men to die; and His spirit passed into the state 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 163 


which is the common habitation of the dead; but 
“ His soul was not left in hell, neither did His flesh 
see corruption: He rose again, on the third day, from 
the dead, and ascended up into Heaven, where He 
now sitteth at the right hand of the Father to make 
intercession for us.” 

Thus the past is ever linked in with the present, 
in the Christian scheme. And, while all the facts of 
the past are historically authenticated, so that pres- 
ent trust is grounded most reasonably on a certain 
historical foundation, on the other hand, the facts 
of the present are explicable only as having their 
roots in just these past events. You know that 
geologists tell us that the surface of our earth bears 
upon and in it unquestionable records of its progres- 
sive history in the creation, that its out-croppings of 
different strata of stone and of earth are indubitable 
indications of the different periods which succes- 
sively marked its history in the progress of creation. 
Just so all existing Christian institutions—the Min- 
istry, the Sacraments, and the Worship of the Chris- 
tian Church, and even the inspired Scriptures of the 
Christian Testament—are out-croppings, as it were, 
of the actual Christian history, and could not be, as 
we know they are, in present existence, except as 
results from the historical verities. 

Take, for example, the observance, which is main- 
tained in all Christendom, of the first day of the 
week as a day of holy worship and rest. This ob- 
servance is professedly grounded on the resurrection 
of Christ from the dead. He rose on this day of the 
week; therefore, it was made the Christian Sabbath, 


164 LAE IWILTNVE SS OMe L Hi CHORCH 


consecrated as the Lord’s Day, and substituted for 
the day which, from the beginning of the world, had 
been hallowed by the obligations of a divine com- 
mandment. 7 

Now, imagine that there was no resurrection of 
Christ from the dead, and you can find no possible 
explanation of this existing institution. For, it is ob- 
vious and unquestionable that its observance dates 
from the very event itself. The obligation to keep 
it rests, not on an enactment or appointment which 
might be made at any time for the special purpose, 
but it goes back directly to the Fact, and declares 
that when it had taken place the day of its occur- 
ence was at once recognized by the Apostles, who 
had the mind of the Spirit, as analogous in the 
Christian scheme to the day when God rested from 
all His work in the creation, and was thenceforth 
universally hallowed in the Christian Church. Never 
has there been a moment, from that time to this, when 
the observance was, or could have been, separated 
from the fact; never a generation who did not be- 
lieve, not only that it was their duty to observe it, 
but, also, that tt had been observed by their fathers, 
and through them by their fathers, up to the Apos- 
tles who were themselves eye witnesses of the fact. 

This is but an illustration of the relation of the 
present to the past, which subsists in all the Chris- 
tian economy. 

It is a sublime truth, which we have now to con- 
sider, that this connection of the present with the 
past is not confined to the earthly system, but ex- 
tends even into the heavenly world. 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 165 


It is a glorious article of our Faith, that Jesus is 
now exalted at the right hand of God in Heaven, 
where He ever liveth to make intercession for us; 
and, that He is thus exalted and is invested with 
this office because He took upon Him our nature, 
and in it suffered death, and rose again from the 
dead. 

The Ascension is a fact of the past, and, as such, 
not only abundantly authenticated by the testimony 
of those who were eye witnesses of the fact, but it 
was also so linked in with the Resurrection as to be 
its necessary consequent. If Christ rose from the 
grave and gate of death into life again on this earth, 
He would be still here, had He not passed away 
either through a second death or by living transla- 
tion. But, inasmuch as it is certain, that having 
once on the cross suffered death, He “dieth no 
more,” it is unquestionably certain that He departed 
from the earth by ascending up into Heaven. The 
one great miracle, being authenticated, puts its seal 
upon the other as an incontestable, and even a nec- 
essary fact. 

Asa fact how glorious it is! No wonder that, if 
in the scheme of the economy of Divine grace, it was 
to take place, it should have been anticipated by 
types and prophecies, and abundantly verified in the 
evangelical history. 

What a revelation it makes to us of the world to 
come! How it opens Heaven, and lets its glory in 
upon even the present earthly habitation of our re- 
deemed and regenerated humanity. 

How it opens Heaven! 


106 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


When the Apostles of Christ stood on Mount 
Olivet, gazing after the ascending Lord, and saw 
His adorable Form rising steadily upward, until it 
disappeared in celestial regions far above the range 
of human sight, they must have felt, not only such 
a certain conviction of His Divinity as they had 
never felt before, but, with this confirmation of their 
faith, oh, what .a flood of new conceptions of the 
Heavenly State, and of new hopes in those concep- 
tions, must have rushed, with overwhelming power, 
upon them. Jesus—their Lord and Master, their 
Friend and Leader, their Teacher and Exemplar, their 
Guide and their Saviour—had ascended up in His 
bodily form, with all its human qualities and at- 
tributes manifestly retained! Himself the same; 
His person the same; His body the same: the same 
in appearance, the same in fact, or if changed, yet 
changed but to be glorified, to be immortal, to be 
superior to all the changes and chances of this 
earthly life, but not divested of a single quality 
or attribute that was essential to constitute His 
personal identity. As such, He had gone up, up 
beyond the atmosphere of this world; up beyond 
the clouds ; up beyond the sky; up beyond the stars; 
up beyond all human ken or thought ; but still, defi- 
nitely upward, into some Place where His Throne was 
prepared! And, since they knew that place to be 
Heaven, Heaven itself was assuredly revealed to them, 
as in some apprehensible, though doubtless mysteri- 
ous sense, a locality, and not a mere abstract state. 

Through them the revelation has come to us; 
and, by faith in it, we see Him who is invisible, 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 167 


and look for “a city which hath foundations, whose 
builder and maker is God.” True, we know but 
little of that City now, nor doth it yet appear what 
we shall be when, translated with Christ from earth, 
we shall have our everlasting habitation therein. 
We stand with the Apostles, “gazing up into 
Heaven,” and, with them we can see no farther than 
“to the cloud which has” received Him out of our 
“sight.” The cloud is impenetrable. We only 
know that Jesus hath gone through it, and that He 
hath His throne of everlasting glory in the Heaven 
of heavens, far above it. But there the vision 
ceases, and our knowledge finds its limit. The cloud 
interposes; and eye doth not see, nor ear hear, nor 
is the heart able to conceive the mysteries of the 
heavenly state. We are mere little children here— 
children of a day; and it were presumption indeed 
to expect that our puny imaginations could com- 
prehend the elementary conditions and qualities, 
much less take in all the verities of that state which 
is infinite and eternal. It cannot be expected that 
the language of our best and wisest discourse about 
it should have in it much more of verisimilitude 
than children’s babbling. And yet, the revelation 
which we have received is truly substantial; and 
it is an inestimable privilege, a cause for unspeakable 
thankfulness, that we live in its glorious light. 

To know that Heaven is real, and, as such, far 
above this earthly state; to be assured, therefore, 
that our life, though it be but “as a vapor which 
appeareth for a little while and then vanisheth 
away,’ is yet not vapor, but a true existence upon 


168 LHETWITNESS OR NTHE: CHURCH. 


which its Creator hath stamped the mark of His 
own Immortality ; to know that one of our own 
race—as truly a man as any descendant of Adam, 
notwithstanding the union in His person of the 
Divine nature with His humanity—hath actually 
passed into the Heavens, and now sitteth at the right 
hand of God as our Mediator with God; and, there- 
fore, to have a hope, sure and steadfast as an anchor 
cast within the vail, that when we shall have passed 
away from this earth, though it be through the 
grave and gate of death, we shall not be left in dark- 
ness, nor given over to irredeemable corruption, but 
shall only be detained to await a summons to be 
caught up to meet the Lord in the air, and thence- 
forth to be forever with Him: to know that though 
it doth not yet appear what we shall be in the 
heavenly state, it is nevertheless certain that, being 
with Him made Sons of God, we shall be like Him, 
and, therefore, shall have still, and be conscious of 
having, all the qualities, that are essential to con- 
stitute our personal identities, and with these quali- 
ties shall have participation in the power of His 
endless Life; shall have our everlasting abode in the 
mansions of His Father and our Father in Heaven; 
shall come not only in faith, not only in spirit, but 
actually in our own persons, unto the city of God, 
the heavenly Jerusalem, where are the innumerable 
company of the angels, the general assembly and 
Church of the first-born which are written in Heaven, 
and God the Judge of all, and the spirits of just men 
made perfect, and Jesus the Mediator of the New 
Covenant ; where there shall bea full and everlasting 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 169 


verification of that voice which has been already 
heard in prophetic vision, saying, “Behold the 
tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell 
with them, and they shall be His people, and God 
Himself shall be with them and be their God:” “and 
God shall wipe away alltears from their eyes; and 
there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor 
crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for 
the former things are passed away ;’”—to know all 
this, as we do know it by the accomplished facts 
and the revealed truths of our Lord’s Resurrection 
and Ascension—oh, this is surely a great advance 
on our natural ignorance; and there is in it more 
than enough of veritable certainty to sustain our 
strongest faith and justify our liveliest and most 
ardent hope. 

In the light of this revelation how changed is the 
aspect of all human history! There is no word, per- 
haps, which so truly characterizes life on this earth 
as the word disappointing. The world is full of 
promise, but there is no realization. Whether on 
the general scale or in the life of individuals, history is 
ever leading us on to expect great things, and ever 
ending in failure, or at least in results far short of our 
expectations. There is no nation that has fulfilled 
its destiny according to the measure of its opportu- 
nities or its capabilities; and there is no individual 
life, however comparatively happy or prosperous, 
the experience of which might not be summed up 
most truly at its close, in the words of the old 
patriarch: “ Few and evil have the days of the years 
of my life been!”” The simple fact that life is mor- 


L/S THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


tal makes it under all circumstances and in every 
form feeble and despicable. It passes away, and 
when it is passed, “it is all one,’ as Newman says, 
with his characteristic terseness, “whether it has 
lasted two hundred years or fifty.” But its imperfec- 
tion consists not simply in its mortality; it lies not 
less in its failure to develop and adequately employ 
the capabilities of those who live it. “Men there 
are, who in a single moment of their lives have 
shown a superhuman height and majesty of mind 
which it would take ages for them to employ on its 
proper objects, and as it were to exhaust; and who, 
by such passing flashes, like rays of the sun and the 
darting of lightning, give token to us that they are 
but angels in disguise, destined to judge the world, 
and reign as kings forever. And yet, they are sud- 
denly taken away and we have hardly recognized 
them when we have lost them.” Nor even in 
characters of common capabilities does life seem 
adequate to accomplish what they might. ‘There 
is something in moral truth and goodness, in faith, 
in firmness, in meekness, in courage, in loving kind- 
ness to which this world’s circumstances are quite un- 
equal, for which the longest life is insufficient, which 
makes the highest opportunities of this life disap- 
pointing, which must burst the prison of this world 
to have its appropriate range. So that whenever a 
good man dies, let him have lived ever so long, fore- 
score years or more, there is reason to feel disap- 
pointed, especially in the reflection that he has 
never fully developed all the excellent gifts, which, 
by God’s grace, were in him, never had oppor- 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 171 


tunity to exercise all his powers and reach his full 
scope.” * 

Such is human life in its earthly aspect. But, let 
in upon it now the revelation of the heavenly world, 
of that Life and Immortality which Christ hath 
brought to light, and how the clouds scatter and the 
shadows flee away! The zuxcompleteness of life, its 
inadequacy to fulfil its promise, is now seen to be 
legitimately involved in its constitutional relation to 
the future. It ought to seem incomplete, for it zs in- 
complete. It is transitory and short, coming very 
soon in any event, and it may be very suddenly to 
its close. But its close is not an end, it is but a be- 
ginning, an introduction to that life which will, in 
truth, be endless. The world passeth away and 
cometh to nought; but its true purpose is seen and 
its true destiny fulfilled elsewhere. It may not de- 
velop all the capabilities which it evidently posses- 
ses; but, if it exercise them sufficiently to train and 
discipline them, so that they shall be strong and 
vigorous when they shall have adequate scope, 
surely its existence is not in vain. This may be 
said not only in respect to individual lives, but also 
of history on a general scale. Though the end be 
here ever in ruins, yet it is not all in vain. For all 
earthly kingdoms are but experiments and tempo- 
rary expedients; yet they are surely preparatory for 
and destined to become “the kingdom of our Lord 
and of His Christ, wherein He shall reign forever and 
ever.” To bring about that glorious consummation, 
to carry the world steadily on towards it, is one of 


* See Newman’s Par. Ser., vol. ii. Sermon xiv. 


172 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


the great purposes for which it is revealed that our 
Lord is now seated on His mediatorial throne in 
Heaven. 

Correlative with this, is that high, spiritual pur- 
pose to which we may well give our thoughts in 
concluding our consideration of this great subject. 

Repeatedly in the New Testament, and especially 
in the Epistle to the Hebrews, is it plainly declared 
that our Lord is now in Heaven as our Intercessor 
with the Father. We are told that He hath gone 
up on high “to present Himself before the face of 
God for us;” that He “hath entered by His own 
blood, once for all, into the Holy Place, having 
effected eternal redemption;” that, He “ ever liveth 
to make intercession for those who come unto 
God by Him, having a Priesthood which will not 
pass from Him;” and that “we have such a High 
Priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of 
the Majesty in the heavens, a Minister of the Sanc- 
tuary and of the True Tabernacle, which the Lord 
pitched, and not man.” 

These, and similar passages, which are numerous, 
teach us that Christ in Heaven is nota King only, 
but a Priest also; that He there exercises the 
functions of the true Priesthood, of which all min- 
istrations in the Church on earth are but types. 
Doubtless, this is most mysterious and beyond our 
comprehension. We are not given to see into the 
Secret Shrine in which God dwells; clouds and dark. 
ness are round about Him. Before Him stand the 
Seraphim, veiling their faces; Christ is within the 
veil, pleading the merits of His Sacrifice, and mak- 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. IVs 


ing perpetual intercession for us. It is incomprehen- 
sible, but, oh, how comforting. And with what 
boldness may it well inspire us to come unto God 
by Him. 

And, in the light of this truth, what mysterious 
and awful import is given to the ministrations of His 
Church here on earth. If the sacrificial rites of the 
old dispensation derived virtue from this heavenly 
source, though they were merely its typical antici- 
pations, surely the sacraments and the other spirit- 
ual sacrifices of the Church which He hath purchased 
with His own blood, and through which He dispenses 
His grace from generation to generation until the 
number of His elect shall be filled up, surely, I say, 
these cannot be unmeaning or empty ceremonies. 
Nay, rather, they are fulfilling His prayer: Thy will 
be done on earth, as it is done in Heaven. In them 
His great High Priesthood, exercised in Heaven for 
men, is here dispensing its gracious benefits to men. 
Through them we are made partakers, even here in 
this world, of the powers of the world tocome. We 
are admitted into the sanctuary of His Holiness, 
and have our place in the congregation of His saints. 

May He grant us all grace so to worship Him in 
spirit and in truth, and so to receive and use all the 
ministrations of His Church in the present earthly 
dispensation, that when it shall come, as come it 
surely will in His appointed time, to an end, we 
may be found fitted to take our place at once among 
His saints, in the glory of that dispensation which 
is eternal in Heaven. 


174 LHE WLTENE SS OR NTAE” CHORCH 


XVIII. 


CHRIST IN HEAVEN THE HEAD OF HIS 
CHURCH ON EARTH. 


Ascension-tide. 


And hath put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be the 
Head over all things, to the Church, which is His body, the fulness 
of Him that filleth all in all.— ZA. 7. 22, 23. 


THE Apostle is here speaking of the divine honor 
and glory to which our Lord Jesus Christ was raised 
after His triumph for our sakes over sin and death. 
“God,” he says, “according to the working of His 
mighty power, which He wrought in Christ when 
He raised Him from the dead, set him at His own 
right hand in heavenly places, far above all princi- 
pality, and power, and might, and dominion, and 
every name that is named, not only in this world, 
but also in that which is to come; and hath put all 
things under His feet.” It is evident that it is of our 
Lord, not simply in His Dzvinze nature, that this is 
said; for in that nature He needed not to be, and 
indeed could not be raised to any higher degree of 
exaltation than that which He had with the Father 
from all eternity; but itis of Him in His two-fold 
nature as both God and man; just such as He was 
while He lived, and suffered, and died here; such 
was He when He rose from the dead; such when 
He ascended up on high; and such is He in that 
infinite exaltation which is here so magnificently 
described. As the Christ; the God Incarnate; the 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 175 


Saviour of the world, both Divine and human, He 
is ‘“‘ raised even to the right hand of the Majesty on 
high,” and enthroned in the very Heaven of heavens, 
“far above all creatures, not only in this world, but 
also in the world to come.” 

Now, in our present consideration of this great 
fact in the Christian revelation, I wish to fix your 
attention specially on what the Apostle says in the 
text as to the continued relation of Christ with His 
Church on earth, and the essentially Divine constitu- 
tion and character of that Church itself. The in- 
ference of short-sighted human reason would be, 
that in such infinite and surpassingly glorious exal- 
tation, Christ could no longer have any sympathy 
for us here on earth, much less any personal con- 
nection with us. If all the ranks of the heavenly 
hosts are beneath His feet, and if even the highest 
of the Angelic spirits is infinitely below Him, we 
could scarcely dare to assume that He would still 
recognize and maintain any bond of relationship 
with us, His earthly creatures. But in the text the 
Apostle assures us that Christ is not exalted in 
Heaven, any more than He lived, and suffered, and 
died, here on earth for Himself; but that He is thus 
exalted in order that He may still carry on and com- 
plete the great work of human salvation. As for 
that purpose He became incarnate, and made His 
incarnate life the organic seed of His Church, which 
Church He purchased unto Himself with His own 
most precious blood; so, having by His resurrection 
from the grave secured to it the power of an endless 
life, He raised it up together with Him and endowed 


176 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


it with heavenly functions and character, when He 
ascended up again from earth and resumed the glory 
and majesty of His heavenly state. So, in the text 
the Apostle represents Him as still maintaining the 
most intimate and vital connection with the Church; 
a connection no less intimate and vital than that of 
a head with its body. He is made, says the Apostle, 
“the Head over all things to the Church, which is 
His body, the Fudness of Him that filleth all in all.” 

Now, it is not possible for us to grasp with our 
understandings, or even to conceive in our imagina- 
tions, how it is that the Son of God on His heavenly 
throne continues to hold the Church on earth in this 
vital relation to Himself personally, but its appre- 
hension in any degree as a truth awakens concep- 
tions, not only of the loving mercy of the Saviour, 
but also of the dignity of His Church, which are far 
above those that commonly prevail, or that, for the 
most part, have prevailed, among such as profess and 
call themselves Christians. 

Take it, first, in contrast with the theory of the 
Church’s headship which is known as the Papal 
theory, and which has been held for ages as an ar- 
ticle of faith in the Church of Rome. This theory 
assumes that when Christ ascended up into the 
heavens, He ceased to hold the close, personal re- 
lation to the Church, which He held while He was 
living here; that He no longer retained in Himself, 
as His own peculiar prerogative, the functions of its 
Headship, but that He left this, asa delegated office, 
in the hands of one of its human Bishops—the 
Bishop of Rome. Now, how far above sucha theory 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 177 


is the truth set forth by the Apostle in our text. 
“Christ is the Head, over all things, to the Church, 
which is His Body.”” There is no need, indeed there 
is no possible admission, of an earthly head here. 
Though Christ is passed into the heavens, and the 
world seeth Him no more, yet, He is not separated 
from His Church. It is still His Body, and He is 
still its Head. In His exaltation, it is likewise ex- 
alted. It has infinitely higher graces, and discharges 
higher functions than it could have had, or exer- 
cised, if He had remained in the flesh. The life by 
which it is animated is the life of the Divine Spirit, 
thevery Life of God; so that, as Christ is One with 
the Father, even so its Members are made one with 
Him. And, now that He is exalted above all creat- 
ures not only in this world but in the world to come, 
it is commissioned and enabled, both to publish the 
riches of His grace among all men, and also to show 
forth unto the principalities and powers in heavenly 
places the manifold wisdom of God. 

Away then with this notion of an earthly head- 
ship. It deprives the Church of participation in the 
triumphal glory of Christ’s exaltation. Aye, worse, 
it leaves Her, because of His exaltation, without 
Him, and, since He is the only Mediator, without 
God in the world. Thank God, this is not so. 
Thank God for the assurance of His own infallible 
Word, that, when He raised Christ from the dead, 
and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly 
places, far above all principality and power, and 
might, and dominion, and every name that is named- 


He did not take Him from us, but, “raised us up to, 
12 


178 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


gether, with Him, and made us sit together in heav- 
enly places”; so that, while all things are under His 
feet, He is still, and will ever continue to be, “the 
Head of the Church”, and it is, “ His Body, the Ful- 
ness of Him that filleth all in all.” 

But there is another theory of the Church which 
is, if possible, still more inconsistent than that of 
the Papacy, with this doctrine of its Divine Head- 
ship. 

What is the conception of it which most persons 
have in modern Protestant Christendom? What is 
the common conception even among ourselves? 
Why, that the Church is simply an association, for 
the purposes of Christian worship and discipline, of 
such persons as agree in certain particulars of faith 
and practice. It is thought to be the right of 
professing believers to organize, or to unite with, 
any such association in accordance with their pe- , 
culiar opinions or tastes. True, there is an abstract 
notion about a divine origin, and in some sort a di- 
vine constitution of the Church, but with most per- 
sons, nowadays, this has no practical significance, 
and is held only as a faint, lingering sentiment of an 
ancient traditionary faith. Take the common ex- 
pression, for instance, that one “has joined” or “is 
about to join” the Church, and see what is meant by 
it. Nothing more, certainly, in most cases, than that 
he becomes a member of some Christian denomina- 
tion; that is to say, he selects and joins, according to 
his taste, or his associations, or his notions, or, at 
best, one or two points of belief, some one out of 
many ecclesiastical organizations, all of which are, 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 179 


equally and alike, Churches of Christ, and any of 
which it was entirely at his option to prefer. 

Now, without entering at all into the question as 
to the comparative claims of any denomination to 
be truly the Church, or a legitimate branch of the 
Church of Christ, the point to be observed is that 
the conception—the idea—of the Church, which thus 
actually prevails and is by most persons entertained, 
is, that it is really only a voluntary association, a 
human organization for religious purposes. For, no 
other idea could, by any possibility, be reconciled 
with the existing state of things. It could not for 
a moment be thought, as it commonly is, that any 
society professing to be Christian, is, by virtue of 
this simple profession, a true Christian Church; that 
there may be, therefore, and actually are, a countless 
number of such associations, differing from each 
other in every way, in their constitutions, their ser- 
vices, and their doctrines, yet all alike, one as much 
as another, churches of Christ; and that, to ques- 
tion this, to prefer one above the rest on any higher 
ground than that of mere preference, is a mark of 
uncharitableness and bigotry; this, I say, could not 
be, as it certainly is, the common sentiment, if there 
were in the common mind any higher conception or 
idea of the Church than that of a voluntary society 
which any number of professing Christian men are, 
at any time, competent to form. That this is really 
the common idea among us seems, therefore, to be 
clear. 

Now, consider what the inspired Apostle says in the 
text concerning the Church, and you cannot but see 


180 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


that his doctrine is infinitely higher than any such 
theory. The Church, he says, is CHRIST’S Bopy, 
not a human organization; not a society which you, 
or I, or any, or all men on earth can form, but, 
Christ's Body ; and that so truly and essentially that 
it is the very “ Fulness of Him that filleth all in all.” 
This is the inspired definition of the Church. All 
that Holy Scripture teaches respecting it, and re- 
specting its members, both collectively and individ- 
ually, is in harmony with this. For instance, the 
very terms which describe the state and condition of 
Christians, in contradistinction to others, imply it. 
They are said to be, not only disciples of Christ, but 
az Him; not only, called by His name, professors of 
His religion, or members of a society which recog- 
nizes Him as the Saviour, but ‘“ members of His flesh 
and of His bones,” and “ one together in Him, even 
as He is One with God.” And so, the true and 
faithful members of the Church are uniformly iden- 
tified with Christ; and all that He did on earth, as 
well as all that He is in heaven, is appropriated to 
them, as theirs by virtue of this union which they 
have with Him. The life which they live is said to 
be, not theirs, but, it is He living in them. In Bap. 
tism, it is said that they are ‘baptized into His 
death;” that, “like as He was raised up from the 
dead, by the glory of the Father, even so they also 
should walk in newness of life.” All that they do 
and endeavor is said to be in Christ’s strength and 
righteousness. Even in all that they suffer, they 
are said to be “filling up, in their mortal flesh, His 
sufferings,” “for His Body’s sake, which is the 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 181 


Church,” they are said “all to eat the same spiritual 
meat, and to drink the same spiritual drink ;” and 
that meat and drink are Christ’s Flesh and blood, 
according to His own express promise: “ My Flesh 
is meat indeed, and My Blood is drink indeed ;” “ He 
that eateth My Flesh and drinketh My Blood dwell- 
eth in Me, and I in him.” And so, His Eternal Life 
is theirs,—theirs, not only in future anticipation, but 
in present actual possession. They are said to be, 
“ not of the world,” even as Hé is “ not of the world,” 
and their “life is hid with Him in God.” Hereafter, 
they have the promise of “seeing as they are seen, 
and knowing as they are known;” but, meanwhile, 
even now, they are assured, that, as Christ is exalted 
at the right hand of God, they are “ quickened with 
Him,” and “ raised up together, and made to sit to- 
gether in heavenly places.” 

Thus, throughout the New Testament, the repre- 
sentations of the state and condition of those who 
are members of the Church correspond with the 
definition of it which is given in the text; they are 
uniformly represented as being, by virtue of their 
union with the Church, so closely and vitally united 
with Christ, as to be, in a true sense, members of 
His Body and participants in His Life. 7 

If then, my brethren, we would have the true 
idea of the Church, if we would hold it in our esti- 
mation, in exact accordance with the Bible-standard, 
no higher and no lower, then it is certain we must 
believe it to be the “Body of Christ,” and “the 
Fulness of Him that filleth all in all.” We must 
believe that that “ Divine and adorable form” which 


182 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


was once manifested on earth in the flesh, and which 
Apostles saw and handled, is, as now ascended into 
the heavens, “a principle of life, a secret origin of 
heavenly existence” to all the faithful, through the 
ministration of the Holy Ghost; and that the ordi- 
nances of the Church are both signs and seals of this 
spiritual ministration. 

In accordance with this, and with nothing lower 
than this, must be our estimation of the importance, 
both as duty and privilege, of membership in the 
Church. Never may the question as to whether or 
no we are, or ought to be, connected with it, be 
considered as if it were merely a question respect- 
ing connection with some human society; but it is 
tantamount to nothing less than this, whether we 
are, or ought to be, members of the body of Christ ; 
whether His flesh and blood, which were given for 
the life of the world, are, or are to be, our food and 
sustenance; whether, in conformity to the Divine 
constitution, we may “receive of His fulness,” 
‘“srace for grace,” and “grow up into Him in all 
things, which is the Head, even Christ.” The Word 
of God plainly makes this the purport of the ques- 
tion, and we shall come short of the Bible-standard 
in just so far forth as we esteem it less than this. 

But it may be asked now, does not all this imply 
that the Church, in the true sense of the word, is 
purely a great spiritual body, membership in which 
is secured simply by living faith in Christ, without 
the medium of any earthly instrumentality, and 
without dependence on any of those associations 
which we are accustomed to look to and speak of as 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 183 


Churches? To which we answer: that the Church, 
in its largest and fullest sense, does unquestionably 
include the whole family in Heaven and earth, of 
which Christ is the Head, and holds, as participants 
in its Divine life, the spirits of just men made per- 
fect in Paradise not less than the strugglers after 
holiness still on earth. But as exercising its func- 
tions on earth, and so as claiming and guaranteeing 
our individual membership, the Church is unques- 
tionably constituted as a visible body, in actual 
historical verity set up in the world; seen and known 
among men; the witness and keeper, the pillar and 
eround, of revealed truth; the publisher of the 
everlasting Gospel; through the ministrations of 
which all men, in all nations and through all time, 
are to be brought unto salvation, and against which 
the gates of hell shall never prevail. Vhe Church 
in this relation and to this extent must be verifiable. 
And, plainly, it can be so only by the identity of 
its ministrations in all essential respects with those 
instituted by Christ ; that is, through the historical 
succession of its original ministry and its adminis- 
tration of the Word and Sacraments according to 
Christ’s ordinance, in all those things that of neces- 
sity are requisite to the same. 

And just this, my brethren, let me say in closing, 
just this is the reason why, for us, no Christian min- 
istrations can be authoritatively effective or satis- 
factory which are not substantiated by these histor- 
ical credentials. We do not presume to limit the 
goodness or mercy of God. We do not doubt that 
in every nation and in every ecclesiastical connec- 


184 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


tion, they that fear Him and work righteousness 
will be accepted of Him; nor do we doubt that the 
boundaries of His Church are infinitely wider than 
those of any organization on earth; that they ex- 
tend into the heavenly world, and include all that 
are redeemed by His blood; but while we are on 
probation in this life, and have to work out our 
salvation with fear and trembling, it must be ac- 
counted as both our highest privilege and our most 
bounden duty to be in the communion of the Church 
which we know by verifiable historical credentials 
to be His. For here we are certain that, if only we 
be faithful, we may “grow up into Him in all 
things, which is the Head, even Christ ; from whom 
the whole body, fitly joined together and compacted 
by that which every joint supplieth, according to 
the effectual working in the measure of every part, 
maketh increase of the body, unto the edifying of 
itself in love.” 


ZO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 185 


DX: 


Cpe rN LECOSDTAL, JINAUCGOKALTTON:. OF 
PAE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT, 


Whitsunday. 


When the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one 
accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from Heaven 
as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they 
were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as 
of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with 
the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit 
gave them utterance.—Acts, xt. I-5. 


THE great event which is recorded in these words 
we this day commemorate. I trust that our hearts 
have already been kindled with grateful interest in 
it by the services of the Church ; and now let us, for 
a few moments, gather up our thoughts so that we 
may have a distinct conception of the fact anda 
clear apprehension of its most important practical 
consequences. ; 

It was on the day of Pentecost that the event oc- 
curred. And what was the day of Pentecost? It 
was a day which had been observed for more than 
a thousand years asa Festival in God’s Church— 
celebrating the completed in-gathering of the first 
harvest, and also commemorating the giving of the 
Law on Mount Sinai. And it is, surely, a very signif- 
icant fact that, on that Festival the Holy Spirit came 
down. The old dispensation was characterized as 
the /eza/ dispensation—the dispensation of the Law 


186 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


—because it was instituted through the revelation 
which God vouchsafed on Mount Sinai, and wherein 
He brought His chosen people under the clearly 
proclaimed conditions of His moral law. But 
there were repeated prophetic intimations that this 
dispensation was not to be the final one; that it was, 
in fact, preparatory to a dispensation which should 
enjoy such a fulness of spiritual grace, as to render 
unnecessary many of the legal restrictions which 
were then imposed. And, therefore, while the old 
dispensation was known, as we have said, as the dis- 
pensation of the Law, there is good reason to believe 
that they who lived under it were accustomed, 
for ages, to look forward to the coming dispensation 
with a distinct apprehension of this fact, viz., that it 
would be known as the Dzspensation of the Spirit. 
How significant, then, the Pentecostal coincidence ! 
How obvious to every faithful heart is made the ful- 
filment of the prophecies and the ushering in of the 
long-looked-for dispensation of grace! And tous, in 
these later ages, who look back through many cent- 
uries in commemorating it, what an illustration does 
it present of the unity of the inspired history, of the 
harmony of the successive revelations through which 
God hath vouchsafed to our fallen race a knowledge 
of His will and communications of His grace. 

But let us now consider definitely what was the 
out-pouring of the Holy Spirit, which occurred on 
the Pentecostal day? How was it that the Holy 
Ghost came down from Heaven then, as He had 
never come before? Through what practical rela- 
tions is it that His descent then has constituted 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 187 


the dispensation in which we are living the Dzspensa- 
tion of the Spirit ? 

We must not begin by imagining that until the 
Pentecostal outpouring, there had been no spiritual 
grace, no vouchsafement of sanctifying influences, 
in human society and human hearts by the power of 
the Holy Ghost. Bear in mind that human civiliza- 
tion, as we know it, was then, at least, four thousand 
years old; and remember that through all ages the 
elements of human nature were essentially the same, 
and the relation of mankind to God precisely the 
same, as now. From the beginning, it was true, 
that, in the fallen nature of humanity, there was no 
inherent ability to think a good thought. “Very 
far gone,”’ as this nature was “from original right- 
eousness,” its sanctification was impossible save by 
the renewing power of divine grace. Had the sanc- 
tifying influences of the Holy Spirit been withheld, 
then, what a pandemonium would our world have 
become! How utterly, irredeemably, hopelessly, 
sunk in the accumulated corruption of so many 
ages of unmitigated depravity! 

But, thank God, they were not withheld. The 
provisions of Redemption were coeval with the fall ; 
and never from the first, has a human heart, born 
into the inheritance of sinful corruption, been left 
without being cared for and striven with, for its con- 
version and renewal unto holiness, by the Holy 
Ghost. Never in ancient Judaism or even in hea- 
thenism has there been an honest and docile sub- 
mission to that spiritual influence without resulting 
in a corresponding counteraction of the natural de- 


188 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


pravity and a transforming of the character from the 
image of Satan to the image of God. Therefore, 
the saints of the old dispensation were true saints; 
that is, they were converted saints,—converted from 
natural sinfulness to Godly holiness, by simply sub- 
mitting themselves, as we must all submit ourselves 
if we would be saved, to the guiding, illuminating 
and sanctifying influences of God’s good Spirit. 
They had much less light than we, and lived under 
the disadvantages of a revelation which was far be- 
low the Christian revelation in point both of clear- 
ness and of fulness; but the essential principles of 
godliness were the same then as now; the principles 
and affections of the godly character came then as 
now from that Spirit, without Whom there can be no 
light of heavenly life. Abel and Seth, and Enoch; 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Moses and Joshua and 
Samuel; David and Solomon, and the holy men and 
women who came after them, were all servants of 
the same God whom we worship, and candidates for 
the same Heaven to which we are aspiring. There- 
fore, in their several degrees of personal holiness, 
they were converted, sanctified, moulded, formed, by 
the same Spirit, upon whose grace we are dependent 
for whatever of good there may, or can, be in us. 
How clear or distinct may have been their con- 
scious apprehension of the personal character of the 
Divine Spirit, we do not know; but we do know that 
the disobedient in that dispensation were directly 
charged with rebelling against and vexing the Holy 
Spirit ; that the penitent psalmist prayed that the 
floly Spirit might not be taken from him ; and that the 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 189 


prophets repeatedly called upon their contemporaries 
to “be converted,” to make them “a new heart,” and 
to have and exercise all those principles and affec- 
tions which the Holy Spirit quickens in those who 
submit to His gracious will. 

But while all this is unquestionably true, it is also 
true as unquestionably, that the Holy Ghost came 
down on the day of Pentecost as He had never de- 
scended from Heaven before, and that the demonstra- 
tions then given proved His presence in a sense 
so altogether new and unprecedented as to entitle 
the dispensation thus ushered in to be justly desig- 
nated the DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT. 

Let us consider this, and try, as far as we may, to 
get a clear apprehension of the meaning and truth 
of it. 

We must think very reverently, and speak cau- 
tiously, respecting any manifestation of the Divine 
Presence. We know that, in a true and absolute 
sense, though beyond our understanding, God is 
omnipresent, and that there can be no place at any 
time where He is not. It must be true also, though 
still, and equally, beyond our understanding, that, 
wherever the Divine Presence is there must be the 
presence of the holy and undivided Trinity ; since 
we hold it as a fundamental Christian truth, that, 
“ the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the 
Holy Ghost, is all one.” And yet, as it is revealed to 
us that there are three Persons in the Godhead, so, 
we are taught by revelation to believe that, by an 
economy of His own Supreme wisdom, there is a 
division of official relationship to the work of grace, 


199 ~YHE WITNESS OF FHE: CHORCH 


corresponding with the threefold Personality; and 
God the Father is specially the Creator, God the Son 
is the Redeemer, and God the Holy Ghost is the 
Sanctifier. 

Now, consistently with this, we are assured that 
God the Son became incarnate, and so lived for 
thirty years on earth, and, during that time was 
personally here with men as He had not been before. 
From the beginning till that era, it was true to say 
that Heaven only was the habitation of the Most 
High God; and this, notwithstanding the truth of 
His omnipresence; which we know must be a truth, 
though we cannot understand it. But, when the 
Son of God became incarnate, then the earth was 
raised into a participation in this wonderful preroga- 
tive of Heaven. It was the habitation, the dwelling- 
place, for a time, of Him who is God of God; and 
this, not only by His omnipresent power and grace, 
but also by the special presence of His own Person. 

Now, as this is clear in the New Testament history, 
so it is equally clear, that that earthly life of the 
Son of God was only for the time—beginning with 
His Incarnation and ending with His Ascension. 
henceforth, we are assured He is no longer here 
in a natural body, but hath passed into the heavens, 
and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father, 
where He ever liveth to make intercession for us. 

But the Divine Economy never goes backwards. 
It is ever in the line of progress, developing always in 
higher stages. And, therefore, if we could dare to 
anticipate any consequence as most probable from 
this temporary admission of the sons of men to co- 


10. CARISTIAN FAITH. I9I 


habitation with God on earth, it would certainly be, 
that human life on earth would be raised thereby to 
a plane far above its former level, and, that thence- 
forth the enjoyment of personal relationship to God, 
and most intimate communion with God, would be 
the conscious privilege of men as it had never been 
on earth before. 

We might, I say, even dare to anticipate this. 
But the marvellous record of the divine history 
which we read in the commemorative service this 
day changes anticipation into faith, and gives us un- 
questionable fact for the surmise of probability. 

For it is fact—fact certified by all the credentials 
of veritable history—first, that when He was about 
to be taken up, the Son of God promised to send 
from the Father in Heaven another Comforter, Who 
would be in the Church on earth as a personal rep- 
resentative of the Godhead, all, and more than all, 
that Himself in the flesh had been or could be; and, 
second, that on the Day of Pentecost, corresponding 
to this day—the tenth day after the Ascension—there 
was a demonstrated fulfilment of that promise, in 
the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the assembled 
Apostles. That spiritual outpouring constituted the 
full inauguration of this dispensation, and it was 
manifested by outward signs—the rushing wind, the 
forked tongues, the miraculous utterances; these 
were mercifully granted as proofs and tokens of the 
Holy Spirit’s presence, because the Spirit is Him- 
self invisible. But from thenceforth His special 
presence became a perpetual privilege of the Church 
on earth—a presence as true and as personal as that 


Ig2 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


of God the Son had been during His life in the 
flesh. 

Now, this is the great fact which the Church com- 
memorates to-day. 

In the commemoration of this event there is a 
call upon us all fora most thankful recognition of 
the unspeakably precious gifts of divine grace and 
the priceless privileges we enjoy in having our pro- 
bationary lot in this dispensation. It is ours to 
have, not only the attestation of our spiritual nature 
with its responsibilities and its destinies, which is 
granted to all men through the conscience and the 
general illuminations of the Spirit, but also to know, 
in very truth, God the Son as our all-meritorious 
Saviour and perfect Exemplar, and to have His 
Spirit, God, the Holy Ghost, as our ever-present 
Paraclete, to sanctify, to comfort, to enlighten, to 
strengthen, to impart all needful grace and build up 
in all the requisites of growth unto meetness for the 
inheritance of the saints in light. 

Let us remember that this inestimable benefit is 
ever ours and the privilege of every one of us in 
the faithful use of the divinely appointed means of 
grace. It is not a privilege or prerogative of the 
world. It may not be claimed anywhere outside the 
Church, nor here, except through conformity to the 
Divine ordinances. It is no occasional or spasmodic 
influence. It may not be attained by any merely 
emotional process, by any working of ourselves up 
into extraordinary degrees of spiritual sensibility 
through the stimulations and excitements of social 
agencies. It is, in truth, the perpetual, abiding, pre- 


TOP CA RISITANGLAL LE: 193 


rogative of the Church of God; and all its sanctify- 
ing and saving grace is the covenanted portion of 
every faithful soul therein, and flows steadily and 
surely in every sacramental ministration. 

And just this, my brethren, let me say in closing, 
is the explanation, so far, that is, as there can be in 
human language or to human apprehension, an ex- 
planation of the great mystery of sacramental grace, 
which the world finds it so hard, nay, so impossible, 
to understand. To the apprehension of worldly 
minds, that is, of minds that are habitually and ex- 
clusively occupied with material considerations and 
interests, nothing is so absurd, so incredible, as the 
claim for the sacramental application of water to the 
body, that it can have any effect, much less regen- 
erative effect, upon the soul; or, for the sacramental 
reception of bread and wine, that thereby there is a 
feeding on Christ as the food of everlasting life. 
We may go further, and say that nothing is so in- 
credible as the claim for spiritual efficacy in the use 
of any Divine ordinance—the communing with God 
and His saints and angels in the heavenly world by 
the utterances of prayer, or the learning of divine 
knowledge through the teachings of Scripture. But 
the incredulity in such minds goes back of the im- 
mediate fact to an entire failure to recognize or be- 
lieve in the spiritual vitality of the Body of which 
these sacramental ministrations are the normal or- 
ganic functions. Once get this great truth fixed in 
the mind and heart, and there is no difficulty in be- 
lieving, for the recognition follows then as of a truth 
that is as necessary as it is precious, that there must 


13 


194 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


be living spiritual power in these functions; that 
God the Holy Ghost being here, the works that are 
done must be Divine, and, as such, certainly effect- 
ual, if rightly received, to raise us up into the realm 
of the spiritual life and to make us participators in 
its highest and best spiritual influences, unto growth 
in all the requisites of the Life which is everlasting. 

Only let us see to it, that these inestimable bless- 
ings of the dispensation in which we have our lot 
be not lost to us by our want of faith or our neglect 
to receive thankfully and to use rightly the means 
of grace which our all-merciful God hath provided 
for us, and which, through the ministrations of His 
Church, He freely offers to us. 


LPOPCH RI SLIANG LAI iH. 195 


XX. 


Bie GithiS SIAN (MALIA LE GOD@A 
WORSHIE PING FALL, 


Crinitn Guudap. 


Ye believe in God, believe also in Me.—S¢. John, xiv, 1. 


THESE are words of Christ to us. Spoken orig- 
inally to His personal disciples, they come, through 
the ministrations of His Church, to all who live and 
walk in the light of the Christian dispensation. “ Ye 
believe in God;” that is your common duty and 
privilege as men. It is granted to you and de- 
manded of you by proofs of nature and reason as 
well as of special revelation. Therefore, it may be 
taken for granted as something that would be 
beyond question. 

But now, overand above this, there is a Revelation 
in the Gospel. And, to us who have received it, 
whose inestimable privilege it is to be living in its 
light, God is made known, not only as the Great 
Spirit, the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, but 
also as having, in the mysterious constitution of His 
Infinite Nature, personal qualities and affections, 
and as, in His all-gracious and merciful economy, 
condescending to hold personal relations toward us. 
Therefore,—said Christ, He who had declared Him- 
self to be God the Son Incarnate,—not only, ‘“‘ye 
believe in God,” but also “ believe in Me.’”’ By which 
we know He meant, that we should honor Him even 


196 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


as we honor the Father, and put our whole trust 
in Him as our all-sufficient, because our Divine 
Saviour. 

We know, moreover, that with this revelation of 
His Eternal Sonship, He revealed also the personal 
existence and relationship, both in Heaven and on 
earth, of God the Holy Ghost. And therefore, in 
the light of the whole revealed truth, His words in 
the text may be understood as proposing to our 
humble and reverent faith no less than this: Ye be- 
lieve in God as the first Source of all life and the 
object of universal worship ; so also are ye to believe 
in Me as God Incarnate, the One Mediator between 
Heaven and earth; and in God the Holy Ghost, the 
One Divine Spirit, through whose communion and 
fellowship ye are made partakers of the Divine 
Nature and endowed with the capabilities of that 
Life which is truly of God and in God, holy and 
eternal. 

With such import these words of our adorable Lord 
and Master cometo usto-day. And, as we listen to 
them, the Church is bidding us all to “ fall down and 
worship Him that is on the throne, and that liveth 
for ever and ever; and, in our worship here on earth, 
to join with them that cast down their crowns be- 
fore the throne in Heaven, saying: Thou art worthy, 
O Lord, to receive glory, and honor, and power; 
for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleas- 
ure they are, and were created,” and with them that 
“rest not day and night, saying: Holy, holy, holy, 
Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to 
come.” Our belief in God is vain and worse than 


TO, CHRISTIANG FAITH. 197 


vain if it struggles not to find, and if it do not actu- 
ally find, its true expression in worship. 

For, what is this belief in God? Whence comes 
it, and what is its real significance ? 

It is unquestionably substantiated in the convic- 
tions of reason; but it is not, merely, or essentially, 
a conviction of the reason. The thought of God is 
no outcome of logic. When we were little children 
and knelt at our mother’s knees, and lisped the 
prayer: “Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed 
be Thy name;” there had been no possible reason- 
ing, and no need of reasoning, to awaken within us 
the recognition, which we know we had, of the real 
personal existence and the goodness of the Great 
King unto whom we prayed. And if through all 
the experience of life that has come to us since we 
have retained this belief as a veritable conviction of 
the heart, it still has its root and vital power within 
us in something far deeper than a deduction of the 
understanding or aconviction of the reason. The 
thought of God! What is it but the thought of 
essential and absolute greatness and goodness? And, 
to have it, and live in it, and be inspired by it, so 
that our life becomes a veritable worship, what 
is this, but, to have submitted ourselves to the 
guidance of that which we know to be at once the 
deepest impulse and the loftiest principle of our 
nature ? 

Is it intuitive? Isit possible to lose it altogether? 
I do not know. ButI do know, that the more truly 
we are men, and the higher and truer our life be on 
the plane of humanity above that of brute creatures, 


198 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


the more lively is this conception of God, and the 
more necessarily and irrepressibly must it find ex- 
pression in reverential and loving devotion. If, on 
the other hand, it be possible to lose it altogether 
and to have life and consciousness from which it 
has been utterly outrooted, I know that such a 
drear result can come only from a life-long persist- 
ency in shutting out the thought of the excel- 
lence of goodness and a corresponding persistency 
in giving the preference to that which is low and 
base. 

Test it by your own conscious experience. Let 
the appeal come first to those who are habitually de- 
vout, and in whose daily life the enjoyment of com- 
munion and fellowship with God is so real as to enable 
them to adopt, each one for himself, the Apostle’s 
asseveration, “I know Him whom I have believed” ; 
yet, among even these, there is no one whose 
spiritual perceptions are at all times equally clear, 
no one who does not sometimes find the thought 
of God invested with strange obscurity and unreality, 
the thought as of a Being far off, or a mere phan- 
tom, with Whom any endeavor to hold personal 
fellowship seems to be little more than a delusion of 
superstition: in such moments, after making all due 
allowance for the depressing influence of ill health, 
or distracting circumstances, a faithful self-exami- 
nation will seldom fail to discover a preceding neg- 
lect of devotion and the letting down of the heart 
to a lower order of associations, if not to such as are 
postively base and impure. 

If, on the other hand, there be one here whose daily 


TO CHRISTIAN: FAITE 2 199 


life is not in any true sense with God, to whom the 
thought of God is not familiar, and in whose experi- 
ence communion with Him is a thing unknown, I am 
sure there have been moments when even such a life 
has been consciously raised up into a higher than its 
common atmosphere and lightened with rays of un- 
wonted brightness, when divine realities were aspired 
after, if not actually grasped, and the heart was stirred 
with reverential feelings and impulses, if not to con- 
scious and intelligent worship; and I ask, if that 
was not atimewhen there were purifying influences, 
without or within, to which the affections and the 
will had been yielded, and by which they were, as 
not commonly, attuned ? 

So, then, let us understand clearly that true be- 
lief in God is a worshipping belief; and, that its 
root and vital source is not in the imagination, 
not in the understanding, not even in the reason, 
but in the affections and aspirations of the heart. 
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
God.” Just in proportion as the heart is pure, that 
is, just as its desires, its preferences, its cherished 
likings and longings are for the things which are 
righteous and holy, and withdrawn from all taint of 
the low and the unclean, will be the desire to know 
and commune with God. This very desire of the 
better nature is itself an outreaching which is 
instinctive in devout faith. 

Hence we get the real significance of worship, 
as well as its true motive. The very word itself 
—which is an abbreviation of worthship—indicates 
rightly that it is the lifting up of the heart in rever- 


200 LAE WILTNE SSVOL AT Le YCL OIECI1. 


ential and admiring adoration of Him Who ts worthy; 
Him Who is believed and felt to be the One Who 
possesses in Himself all perfection and Who is Him- 
self absolute perfection. Itis, therefore, the highest 
and noblest of all the functions which are possible to 
us as human beings. That we are capable of it, and 
are inspired by impulses to it, is our most character- 
istic token of superiority to all orders of the brute 
creation, and of our right to be associated with the 
higher orders of spiritual intelligences in the heav- 
enly world. For this is their most characteristic em- 
ployment ; “They rest not, day nor night, saying: 
Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, 
and is, andisto come.” And, in uniting with them, 
we are lifted to a real participation in their recog- 
nition—though far below it in degree—of the infinite 
worthiness, the glorious and excellent goodness, 
of “God)) “Thou art -worthy; O,; Lord,*to (rece 
glory, and honor, and power; for Thou hast created 
all things; and for Thy pleasure they are, and were 
created.” : 
But all this, brethren, might be, possibly, true of 
us, even if our lot had been cast, like that of millions 
of our race in all ages, beyond the pale of special 
revelation. It might still be a prerogative and token 
of our manhood, and so far realized in our experi- 
ence that we should at least have been conscious 
of feeling after God, if haply we might find Him. 
But I need not tell you we are within the heritage 
of a higher condition of privilege. We know that even 
in the Worship of Heaven itself there has been in- 
troduced “a new song,” evena song of thanksgiving 


LO CHRISTIAN FAITH, 201 


unto the Lamb together with Him that sitteth upon 
the throne. And surely our hearts should glow to- 
day and all days, not only with the inspirations of 
reverent admiration and holy awe, but also with un- 
speakable gratitude and most fervent love to Him 
who hath washed us in His own bloodand quickened 
us by the might of His own Spirit, that we might be 
raised from sin and death in the inheritance of His 
everlasting life and heavenly glory. 

Therefore, let us make this the one great purpose 
of our service to-day; to realize our high privilege 
and our most bounden obligation; to render unto 
the Triune God, Who is revealed for our worship, the 
homage which is most meet and right, even the 
homage both of revering and admiring, and also of 
trusting and loving hearts. In the life which is con- 
secrated by such homage we shall learn more and 
more to know Him Whom we have believed ; and in 
this knowledge shall growup, O, marvellous result! 
in His likeness; shall be sanctified wholly in body, 
soul, and spirit, and be made meet for everlasting 
companionship with those who “stand round about 
the throne in Heaven, saying: Holy, Holy, Holy, 
Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to 
come.” 

And now unto Him, our Maker, our Redeemer, our 
Sanctifier, be ascribed, as is most justly due, all honor 
and glory, and power and dominion, for ever and 
evern 2Amen. 


202 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


XXI. 
FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF FAITH. 


Trinity Sundan. 


To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, 
that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the 
truth heareth My voice.”— St. John, XVI, 37. 


Tus declaration of our Lord, made more than 
eighteen centuries ago, to one who questioned 
whether there be any such thing as truth or any 
possibility of ascertaining it, is “specially needful 
for these times.” 

In the line of its consideration which I shall ask 
you to take with me now, I begin with the remark, 
and would that I could impress it upon every one as 
a conviction, that a state of confirmed scepticism in 
respect to religious truth is the most disheartening 
state into which one can fal. 

It is better, far better, to be a misbeliever than 
an unbeliever; better to be mistaken in the object 
of one’s faith than to have no faith. For, the 
moment that faith is gone, the moment that one 
settles in the conclusion that there is no such thing 
as truth or no ascertainment of it, that moment his 
life is left without any guiding principle or elevating 
aim. And one of two wretched results will surely 
follow. He will become either a mere trifler, or else 
a gloomy and malignant hater of everything that is 
accredited as truth. Of course he will then regard 
all who profess to hold and believe in such truth as 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 203 


either hypocrites or fools. And this universal dis- 
trust of others can scarcely help reacting to foster 
dishonesty in himself. He is only playing the same 
game that others are playing, for the same selfish 
ends. Or else heassumesa tone of lofty superiority ; 
deals out hard invectives against bigotry and narrow- 
mindedness; plumes himself on his liberality of 
sentiment and his freedom from sectarian prejudice 
and cant; while in truth he is steeped to the very 
lips in the bitterest malignity against all who dissent 
in the least from his unbelief. 

What a wretched state of mind and heart! Who 
would willingly sink into it? Who would not be 
glad to know and anxious to hold fast the principles 
of thought and life which will preserve him from it? 

Give, then, your earnest attention while we en- 
deavor to indicate and illustrate some of these prin- 
ciples. 

First of all, then, let it be settledas a fundamental 
and unquestionable principle, that in religion, as in 
every other department of knowledge, there is such a 
thing as absolute truth. There either is, or else there 
is not, one living and true God; and He either 
has, or else He has not, made that revelation of His 
nature and will which is contained in the books of 
Scripture and proclaimed in the preaching and sac- 
ramental ministrations of the Church. There can 
be no other alternative; no compromise which can 
mitigate in the least the antagonism between these 
two positions. One of them must be true, true as 
matter of absolute fact, altogether independent of 
any notions of ours, and the other must be as abso- 


204. THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


lutely false. It is not a question between different 
sets or phases of opinions either of which may be 
held or rejected in the way of mere speculation. It 
is not a balance of suppositions or of theological 
notions; but it isa simple unmitigated alternative 
between absolute truth and downright falsehood. 

It follows, therefore, as a second fundamental 
principle, that belief of the truth and Coeged but the 
truth is vitally important. 

Pilate’s question is often put nowadays, whether 
put by him or not in such a spirit, as a sneer at the 
presumed folly of insisting on any decided convic- 
tion as to religious doctrine or fact. ‘What is 
truth?” it is asked; whoneed care for that? What 
difference does it make whether we believe in one 
God or in three Gods, or in twenty, if we only live 
godly? What matter whether we hold all the 
articles of the Christian faith as contained in the 
Apostles’ Creed, or deem this faith no better than 
antiquated superstition, provided only that our con- 
duct accords with good principles? Of what impor- 
tance can any dogmatic shades or degrees of belief 
be, provided only that we are sincere in what we 
do hold? 

This sounds very plausible, and finds an easy cur- 
rency with the careless and superficial, But one 
must be very careless and superficial not to see that 
its plausibility is not that of truth, but of sheer 
fallacy. For it ought to be understood by every 
one that religious fazth is something which is quite 
distinct from and altogether superior to mere ofzn- 
zon. There are unquestionably in religion, as in 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 205 


every other department of life and thought, a thou- 
sand subjects which are properly matters of opinion; 
but here, as elsewhere, they are such matters as are 
uncertain and undeterminable. In assigning them 
to the province of opinion we decide them to be 
such. We do not profess to have certain knowledge 
respecting them; but only a probable judgment. 
We are of the opinion; that is, we think, on the 
whole, from the degree of evidence afforded us, that 
they are so and so; but concede, or ought to con- 
cede, to others who may see them from a different 
standpoint, or, under different degrees of evidence, 
the right to an entirely different opinion. But faith 
is not what one ¢hzuks or conjectures, but what one 
believes , and the subject-matter of delzef is, not that 
which is deemed to be presumable, but that which 
is recognized as accredited fact. Religious faith is 
the assent of the mind and heart to truth as revealed 
from God. This truth is external to us. It remains 
the same whether we believe it or not. It does not 
depend upon our thoughts or sentiments, and is not 
at all affected by them. But surely if it be revealed, 
and if we be living within the light of that revela- 
tion, we must be responsible for its reception, and 
it must make a very great difference in our charac- 
ter and on our destiny whether we believe and con- 
form to it or refuse to do so. 

Everybody understands and admits that in the 
revelation of natyre there are certain truths; and 
that whether men have faith in them or not, does 
not alter nature, but does very seriously affect men. 
It is a truth, for example, that while many of the 


206 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


earth’s products are nutritious, others are poisonous. 
Now, one may have but a very imperfect knowledge 
of all that is involved in this general truth, and his 
practical use of it may be proportionably restricted. 
But faith in the truth will keep him from presum- 
ing beyond his knowledge, and so imsure his safety. 
But if, on the other hand, one determines for him- 
self to ignore this truth, and insist on making his 
own individual taste and opinion the sole rule for 
deciding on what he shall eat or drink, his faith is 
positively wrong; that is, it is faith in his own in- 
fallibility or self-sufficiency instead of in the real 
fact; and it would not be surprising if he should go 
on to choose the sweetness of poison, in which case 
he would have nobody but himself to blame in its 
consequences—suffering and death. 

Precisely so in the Revelation of Grace. The 
subjects of this Revelation are God’s truths—truths 
that do not depend upon the notions or fancies of 
men, and are not at all affected by them. For in- 
stance, that there is one living and true God; that 
He isour Almighty Creator and Father; that He 
cares for us, loves us, yet holds us accountable by 
the laws of righteousness; that, when we had fallen 
under the power of sin, He sent His Only Begotten 
Son to take our nature upon Him, and in it to live 
and die for us; that in the Person of Christ Jesus 
was God the Son incarnate and dwelling in our 
flesh ; that His life was a true fulfilling of the law of 
righteousness, His death a true propitiation and 
satisfaction for our transgressions; that He rose 
from the dead, and ascended again to the right hand 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 207 


of the Father in Heaven, where He now liveth to inter- 
cede for us; that before His Ascension He ordained 
and constituted sacramental ordinances, one for in- 
itiation into His religious economy, and another for 
continued fellowship and communion in its spiritual 
life ; that so was established for universal and per- 
petual extension His Church on earth, “which is 
His Body,” the habitation of His regenerating and 
sanctifying Spirit, in which He is revealed and 
imparted to every faithful soul, as “the Way, the 
Truth, and the Life;”’ and that, the conditions of 
everlasting life are thus proffered to every one of 
us; these, and such as these, are the truths revealed. 
They are truths whether we believe them or not. 
If we had never received a revelation of them we 
should not be held responsible for belief in them ; 
but, surely, no one who is not blinded by miserable 
self-deceit can failto see that if a revelation of them 
have been vouchsafed from Heaven, and if we have 
been placed by Divine Providence within the light 
of that revelation, it must make a vital difference to 
us whether we rightly believe them, or no. If, in 
the light of such a revelation, you throw yourself 
back on your individual fancies and opinions, and 
determine to exercise your independence by trusting 
in and following them, you do not, and cannot, 
change the truth in the least by your conclusions, 
but you do put yourself, in relation to the dispen- 
sation of divine grace, in a position precisely anal- 
ogous to that previously supposed in relation to nat- 
ure. In assuming that position, it is plain, in the 
first place, that the mental temper 1s wrong. It is 


208 THE WITNESS OF THE CHURCH 


an attitude of absurd self-conceit ; an assumption 
that you have sufficient wisdom and strength in 
yourself tostand apart from all the common relations 
of the Economy in which Divine Providence has cast 
your lot, that you can subsist without dependence 
on any of its resources and find your way clearly 
without accepting its light. The vanity of such an 
assumption is equalled only by its folly, and these 
are both surpassed, if possible, under the claims of 
the Christian Revelation, by its ingratitude. For, 
here the withholding of faith involves not only re- 
jection of truth, but also repudiation of a Person, 
and that Person, Him who claims to be the Only Be- 
gotten Son of God, incarnate for our redemption. 
His claim to our faith involves also claims to our 
deepest gratitude and our most dutiful and loving 
devotion; claims to the homage of all that we are 
and have; to the entire submission of ourselves and 
all that is ours, to His service under the direction 
and guidance of His Holy Spirit. It is not pos- 
sible for you to withhold faith from Him, with- 
out its involving as a consequence the refusal of your 
gratitude and your allegiance; it is not possible to 
be deficient in your faith, without an exactly propor- 
tionate detraction from all your religious principles 
and affections. To these considerations, it is to be 
added now, that there is no doctrine which comes to 
us asa doctrine of Revelation, no article of the Chris- 
tian Faith, which is not, in its very nature, if true at 
all, of the utmost practical consequence. Take the 
great fundamental truth of all revealed religion,— 
that there is One Almighty and Everlasting God, 


LOVED RISLIANAPATT FH. 209 


in Whom, and by Whom, and to Whom, are all things. 
This, if it be a truth, is a truth the knowledge of 
which involves obligations far beyond that of a mere 
theoretical opinion; it demands the devotion of all 
our faculties to Him and the most implicit trust in 
Him. On the other hand, we cannot disbelieve 
it, without being left, in our unbelief, “ without God 
in the world;” and our very existence becomes to 
us in consequence, a mere accident of time, without 
principle, without devotion, without hope. So, re- 
specting the revealed character of God, the doctrine 
of the Bible in relation to His attributes—of Om- 
nipotence, Omniprescence Omniscience, Goodness, 
Holiness, Justice, and Mercy—if your belief strip 
Him of any of these attributes, or substitute others 
of acharacter inconsistent with them, it is plain that 
both your service in relation directly to Him and also 
your whole character in all its relations, must be, in 
so far as you are true to your belief, essentially 
affected. So, with any of the doctrines which are 
distinctively Christian, the alternative is the same 
between truth and falsehood and the practical con- 
sequences are just as diverse. If the doctrine of the 
Divinity of Christ be true, it involves the duty of 
honoring Him even as we honor the Father; but if 
this doctrine be not true, then the rendering of such 
honor unto Him is nothing else than downright idol- 
atry. If the doctrine of the Atonement by His blood 
be true, it demands repentance of sin and implicit 
faith in Him for salvation; if it be not true, such re- 
pentance is needless and such faith vain. If the 
doctrine of the Resurrection and Future Judgment be 
14 


210 THE WITNESS (OF THE CHORKCH: 


true, it is our wisdom and duty to live as they that 
must give account, for an inheritance of Eternal 
Life; if it be not true, we may as well adopt for our 
motto, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we 
die.” When such alternatives are at issue, it must 
not be pretended or thought that it is unimportant, 
that it is less than vitally important, for us to know 
and believe the truth. This, then, we repeat, should 
be held ever asa settled fundamental principle, that, 
a true belief, belief, that is, of the truth in religion, 
is not a matter of indifference, but of the utmost 
importance. 

And now there is a third fundamental principle, 
which is this: that in religion, as in all science, the 
truth ts authenticated by certain legitimate rules, and 
has its vitality in organic institutions. 

One would infer from the way in which many per- 
sons speak of “seeking for the truth” that they 
imagine the truth to be adrift somewhere in the uni- 
verse, and that every individual should spend his 
life in seeking for it—each one in his own way and 
on his own account. But surely there are some 
things tried and proved in religion as in everything 
else. Truth has laws and principles which are set- 
tled, and which, as such, are not to be ignored or 
continually reargued ; but, on the contrary, to be ac- 
cepted and relied upon with undoubting assurance. 
Suppose one should adopt a similar philosophy in 
matters of the present life. Suppose we should 
take the ground that every one must find and test 
for himself all truth. Suppose we should compel 
every one to find out for himself whether fire will 


LO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 211 


burn, whether water will drown, whether there be 
any such thing as poison and what are its effects, 
whether it really makes any difference what we eat 
or drink, and in all other matters demand from every 
man, aye, from every boy and girl, the exercise of 
the same “ right of private judgment,” we can easily 
see that the absurdity of our philosophy would soon 
be effectually demonstrated by its practical conclu- 
sions. No, brethren, truth is not thus adrift, with- 
out local habitation or name. It is not thus subject 
ever to individual empiricism. It is established in 
laws and institutions. It has the attestation of tes- 
timony and the prescription of common consent. 
And woe to him who presumes, without very good 
reason, to contradict any fact or doctrine which is 
substantiated by the weight of this concurrent au- 
thority. To do it under any circumstances ts to as- 
sume a tremendous responsibility. It is possible, 
indeed, that a doubt of some principle which is ap- 
parently thus established may cross, and even lodge 
itself, in one’s mind, and evidence against it, seem- 
ingly new and credible, may come to him or fiash 
upon him. And then, his individual responsibility 
requires of him that he should not plunge at once 
into general scepticism, nor suffer his mind to betake 
itself indefinitely and superficially to the entertain- 
ment of all sorts of questions and doubtful disputa- 
tions, but give himself with all his capabilities, under 
a full sense of all the responsibilities that God has 
laid upon him, with a faithful and conscientious use 
of all sources of light and all means and tests of 
knowledge, fo the investigation of just that point ; to 


212 PAE WILNESSIOPAL HE SCH ORC, 


search out the ground of hts doubt and determine the 
worth of his evidence. And it is possible that in the 
process, the old truth may become to him a demon- 
strated falsehood. But he must be an exceedingly 
vain and presumptuous person who does not shrink 
from such a position, or who can enter into it with- 
out most profound deference to the overwhelming 
presumption of prescript authority which stands 
against him. 

The true spirit, then, the spirit which, for the at- 
tainment of both truth and happiness, we should all 
cherish, is not that which puts one continually in a 
doubting and questioning attitude, but it is that of 
a modest and reverential disciple; quick to receive, 
apt to believe, and predisposed to implicit faith in 
all legitimately established authorities. It is a 
gloomy and wretched thing to lose this faith or to 
have it unsettled. There isa conceit which young 
men are especially apt to entertain, and which there 
are peculiar influences at work in our time to foster, 
that scepticism is a proof of strong-mindedness, 
something that one may be proud of. But this isa 
miserable delusion, a delusion which a larger knowl- 
edge and deeper experience of life reveals'to be 
miserable in both its character and its effects. It is 
no proof of intellectual strength, it is but surface- 
work, to doubt. To go on from doubt to disbelief 
is to gosomewhat deeper; but disbelief may require 
no real thought, no knowledge, no honest judgment, 
nothing but an untrue conscience, a depraved taste, 
and a perverse will. These are quite sufficient 
to lead any one who submits himself to their 


TO CHRISTIAN FAITH. 213 


guidance into the lowest depths of religious un- 
belief. 

But, to have a well_grounded faith, to have proved 
the worthlessness and futility of sceptical specula- 
tions, to have come toa clear apprehension of the 
facts and the responsibilities pertaining to all our 
relations, both temporal and eternal, to recognize 
and duly appreciate the evidences of history, of 
prophecy, of miracle, of natural analogies, of divinely 
established and providentially perpetuated institu- 
tions, to have come, through doubt, through diffi- 
culty, through the drawbacks of carnal conceit and 
self-pleasing by real earnest thought and study and 
prayerful striving, unto the knowledge of God in 
Christ, to be able to say honestly, with a noble hero 
of old: “I know whom I have believed, and am 
persuaded that He is able to keep that which I 
have committed unto Him ;” this requires, if not in- 
tellectual strength, at least intellectual and spiritual 
integrity. And it is itself a ground and source of 
strength. “To believe,” as one * who was never 
suspected of any tendency towards a too credu- 
lous faith, says well, “To believe is to be strong. 
Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power. Only so 
far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act 
cheerfully, or do anything that is worth doing. The 
only manly thing, the only strong thing, Is faithaslt 
is not so far as a man doubts, but so far as he be- 
lieves, that he can achieve or perfect anything. All 
things are possible to him that believeth.” 

Let me close, then, with this counsel to all, but 


* F, W. Robertson. 


214 PHE WITNESS OF -THEY CHURCH: 


especially to the young: Never count him a bene- 
factor, but consider him rather as your worst enemy, 
who trifles with your faith or in any way endeavors 
to unsettle it. And never, on your part, be false to 
it. Never allow yourself to be an imitator of Pilate 
in asking sceptically, “What is truth?” But let 
your spirit ever be attuned to find its truest expres- 
sion in the Psalm of Faith. 


‘** Lord, forever at Thy side, 
Let my place and portion be ; 
Strip me of the robe of pride, 
Clothe me with humility. 


‘* Meekly may my soul receive 
All Thy Spirit hath revealed ; 
Thou hast spoken—I believe — 
Tho’ the oracle be sealed. 


‘“* Humble as a little child, 
Weaned from its mother’s breast, 
By no subtilties beguiled, 
On Thy faithful word I rest.” 


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